Consequences
by Quarto
Summary: In a world where things went differently, Rosie Watson finds her father.
1. Sundays in the cafe with Rosie (John)

As I aged, I found that routine agreed with me more than it ever had when I was a young man. I suppose I had finally calmed down. I still went adventuring, I still wrote about it… but each Sunday morning would reliably find me at the small restaurant 'round the corner from my house, where they knew me and would have a pot of Earl Grey ready when I arrived. I would eat a full English, read all the day's news… on my tablet, as the last paper papers had given up the ghost a few years ago… and be pleasantly clucked over by the owner.

On a warm spring morning, I was doing just that, when I felt the familiar sensation of being observed. I glanced up from my eggs and saw that I was, in fact, being watched. My watcher was a tall, pretty, very young woman, sitting alone at one of the high tables near the pastry case. When she caught my eye, she frowned and looked down at her own plate. Shortly thereafter, though, she glanced back up again.

She was clearly a fan. The time when lovely young women would ogle me in restaurants just because of my dubious charms was long past, more's the pity. And this one was far _too_ young for me… probably still a teenager, given her vivid purple-and-blue hair and cheeks still hanging on to the last traces of baby fat.

I smiled at her and tried to look friendly and avuncular as I returned to my news. I actually really do _like _meeting my fans. The sort of celebrity I've got as a semi-notable author involves handing out maybe one or two autographs a week rather than having paparazzi hanging around my house hoping for photos of me with my shirt off.

A minute or two later, the girl got up her nerve and stood. She was wearing the very high platform heels and extremely short skirt that, bless them, had just come back into style. She tottered over towards me like a teenaged giraffe and asked, "Excuse me, but- are you Doctor Watson?"

"I am," I replied. Her speech was clear and correct, but she had a pretty accent, possibly Spanish.

"Doctor _John _Watson?" she persisted.

"The one and only," I smiled.

"Well, sir," she said, wringing her hands and looking at her shoes, "I'm Rosa Echevarria. Rose. Rosie. And I think that you are my father."

I was fairly certain I wasn't having a heart attack, but I noticed my extremities had become colder. I tried to think clearly. This had always been at least a vague possibility, since I wasn't as careful as I should have been as a young man. But if anything… _anyone._.. had come of those affairs, they would have been adults in their thirties, not teenagers. And this girl…

There was something familiar about her. The straight nose and the rounded cheeks… and she was tall, yes, but if she was in fact fifteen and not the eighteen or nineteen I'd taken her for…

"God, are you _Mary's_ daughter?"

There really wasn't any question in my mind, even before she bit her lip and shrugged in a gesture that was so purely _Mary_ as to remove all doubt.

"Well… she called herself _Aurelia_. But… this is my mum. And... you," she said, handing me her mobile, and showing me a photograph of a photograph.

I hadn't seen this one. It must have been taken by one of our friends, since the police had seized our photographer's camera as evidence and by the time they gave it back to me I was in no particular mood to spend time looking at our wedding photos. But there we were, young-ish, and smiling, dressed to the nines in top hat and morning suit and white lace.

Mary had been beautiful, that day, and I'd been happy. Then a month later it all ended, with a break-in and a bullet.

And now, the little blinking pixel from the screen of the dating ultrasound was standing over me, wringing her hands together. I stood up, pulled the other chair opposite me out, and asked her to sit down. She did.

"You- your mum. She gave this to you?" I asked, handing the mobile back.

The girl… Rosie… looked away. My heart sank.

"Not exactly. I saw it once when I was little and then I found it again going through her things. After."

And _oh_, I hadn't thought that Mary still had the ability to hurt me. But then she always was full of surprises.

"After." One word that put the final coda on a part of my life that had been… miserable, and painful, and terrifying… and also thrilling and startling and ecstatic.

All this time, more than sixteen years, Mary had kept that photo that I'd never seen. But now we were in the "after."

"God, I'm so sorry."I said. It was true, in more ways than one, "When-"

"She always _said_," Rosie interrupted me earnestly, "That once I turned eighteen she'd tell me who you were and if I still wanted that I could go and get in contact with you."

"But you're not 18. You're… you'd be just barely fifteen."

Rosie blushed.

"Three months ago. But I figured it out! All on my own, from all _sorts _of clues! Just like in your books!"

I smiled, despite myself.

"You found my books?"

She nodded. "They're… really good."

I raised an eyebrow, because evidently that was one thing she hadn't got from her mum. She was a _very _bad liar.

"I'm glad you like them," I replied, passing over the fact she obviously didn't. It would have been nice if _anyone_ I knew actually cared for any of my popular, successful novels but at least unlike some of them she'd been polite about it.

There was a silence for a moment. I looked at her across the table… pretty, young… and _hopeful._ Like she was a bit scared of me. And that was a terrifying thought, that I suddenly had this new person and almost infinite capacity to disappoint her.

"Rosie… Echevarria," I smiled, "It is _so_ good to finally meet you."

_(Author's note: In this fic, Rosie is a Rosa del Sur and not a Rosamund. This is a name I took from the Ursula K. LeGuin story "Sur" available in the collection "The Compass Rose." I did this for a completely other story well before we had any idea she was going to be a Rosie in the show and so I'm keeping it kthx.)_


	2. Songs of my father (Rosie)

_In England, they used to sing a song. Sometimes the lyrics go:_

_My father was a Spanish captain,_

_Where he lives I do not know,_

_First he kissed me, then he left me,_

_Bade me always answer no._

In my earliest memories, I lived with my mummy in a flat in a small, vine-covered building in the Old City in Montevideo. At least on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, _Rosita_ lived in a _piso _with her _mami _in the _Ciudad Vieja_. We did Russian and French on alternating Sundays. We had two cats, who were always Guillermo and Hamish, because cats aren't very clever, not like little girls, and remembering one name is hard enough for them.

Our life was very quiet, and apart from the cats pretty exclusively _female_… my mother had a narrow circle of friends, almost all single, almost all childless or mothers-of-daughters, and she worked in midwifery. So it took me a long time to realize there was an absence in my existence.

A memory… myself, aged four, playing in my mother's closet, not for any particular reason, just because it was dim and pleasant and secret and the scent of her perfume and the slippery fabric of her dresses were exactly my aesthetic at the time. I ran a hand between two folded bedsheets on the shelf and found a photograph.

In the photograph, my mother looked different than she did now, with short blonde hair, just like mine. She was wearing a long white dress (_a bride's dress_, I remember thinking) and standing, smiling, with a man I didn't know.

_The English and the French brought a song to America, a song about a woman trapped in a life of sin, in a bordello. The most famous version of the song goes:_

_My father was a gambling man,_

_Down in New Orleans..._

When I was five, I became aware of the pregnant women she worked with, and asked the obvious question of how they had gotten that way. My mother had many secrets, I knew that even back then, but she didn't believe in _lying_ to me, and so she told me the truth.

It sounded frankly implausible.

"Did _you _do that?" I finally had to ask.

"I did," she laughed.

It didn't occur to me to ask "with who?" until much later.

That was the year I started school, which was _all_ in Spanish, so we stopped speaking that at home, pulled Russian to half-time, and started doing Mandarin on our alternating Sundays.

I was seven when my mother found the first book. We were taking a weekly trip to Bookshop, near the public market, so she could pick up "The Times of London." She was Brazilian (or so I thought, so all her papers said), but she'd lived in England for a while when she was younger and she missed it sometimes.

John Watson's books had (have) moody, London-fog type covers replete with brooding silhouettes, suitable to the Victorian murder-mystery contents within. They aren't particularly noteworthy but that first look at "A Scandal In Bohemia" stopped my mother in her tracks to stare at it on the endcap.

I looked at the author's picture, some years later. He was handsome, with a short beard and kind eyes, although in the photos on later volumes he shaved the beard off and grew his hair longer. My mother mostly only read sci-fi for fun, but from then on out she bought every single one of his books as they came out each autumn and went through them cover-to-cover.

That day in Bookshop, I had thought she was going to cry.

_Two brilliant Jewish boys from Queens sang a song. It goes:_

_My daddy was a prominent frogman,_

_My mama's in the naval reserve,_

_When I was young, I carried a gun,_

_But I never got the chance to serve._

_I did not serve._

When I was eight a little boy in my class at school got a crush on me. He demonstrated this by pulling my hair, in response to which I laid him out flat and put him into a joint lock.

As I think back on it, I should look that kid up and see if he ended up being some sort of fetishist, because he liked me _even more_ after that.

During the resulting parent-teacher conference it became quite clear that most little girls didn't know how to do that sort of thing, and also that it was just very much _not on_. My mother got incredibly pleasant and smiley and said sort of cheery things about, "And is it the _official _policy of this school to tolerate a climate of sexual harassment of preteens or is this just a coincidence?"

So it all went away. Though in the car on the way home my mother talked about the doctrine of proportionality and how the same skillset that makes you _able _to hurt other people obliges you _not _to do it unless you really must.

She and I were different than other people, I knew that. Uruguay doesn't have strict gun laws, being a kind of sleepy backwaterish place. Despite that I never knew _anyone_ else who had learned how to use one the flat second that she'd gotten dextrous enough not to fatfinger it. None of my friends were taught how to fight. None of them were taught that, "It is incredibly, incredibly unlikely an adult will ever try to harm you, but if it ever happens, this is what you need to do." Nobody had more than one passport under different names, even though we never left the country. Nobody had bug-out bags, repacked anew each month as they grew.

My mother never stopped looking over her shoulder. I realize that, now.

_There's a drinking song out of England. It goes,_

_Me father he do lie in the deeps of the sea_

_With no stone at his head, but what matters for he,_

_It's a clear crystal fountain o'er England doth roll,_

_Give me the punch ladle, I'll fathom the bowl._

"No. No he's not dead," my mother said, when I was ten and asked.

She ran her hands through her long chestnut hair, and sighed.

"I met your father when I was living in England. He's an Englishman, really pretty much the definition of one. He's where you get your beautiful blue eyes, and your chin, and your hair," she smiled, brushing her thumb over my cheek.

"It didn't work out between us, and we decided not to stay together. That happened when I was pregnant with you, and that's for a lot of complicated grownup reasons that I don't want to share with you right now."

(This last line was what she would always tell me about all of the nebulous dark things in her past that she thought it was best I didn't know about.)

"But it was nothing to do with you. He was very happy about _you_. But we decided that it would be better if I left and since at that point you really _had _to come along with me, that you would do that."

_A dying man who probably didn't know that he was dying sang a song. It goes:_

_Daddy was a rolling rolling stone,_

_He rolled away one day and he never came home._

The thing was, that wasn't enough of an answer. I wasn't an idiot, I knew people broke up, got divorces, didn't get married in the first place. Half my friends had single parents, or stepparents, or had gone through nasty custody battles etc. The kids like that got to have extra presents at Christmas because their mothers and fathers felt guilty and sad about how traumatic the divorce must have been for them. What they didn't have was a completely blank space in their life where the adult male should have been.

So was he a bad man? Had my mother been afraid of him? Had she run away?

Was my mother, with all her mysteries, a bad woman? Had he left her because of the trouble that might be following her?

Or was it simpler? It happened while they were expecting me. Was it, deep down, _because _of me?

So when I was fifteen, sad, angry, and intense…I decided. It was my right to know this. I did my research, put together all of the bits that had been floating around for years… and boarded a plane.


	3. The Warning (Sherlock)

On the morning I received Porlock's email, I was temporarily _sans_ blogger. John had replied to a previous text inquiry of mine with a curt, "I've got some personal stuff going on right now and won't be available for a bit."

Texts like this generally meant woman trouble, and I had opted to follow orders and keep well away for the moment. I was right about _that _deduction, incidentally… though I suppose Mary had been John's "_the_ woman." The _one _who changes your life entirely, regardless of the brevity of her tenure within it.

Rosa del Sur Echevarria (Watson) had inherited this from her mother.

In any event, Sally Donovan, though an inferior _companion_ to either John or George, is a better _detective _than either man which makes her a valuable asset. Therefore, we now socialize. Occasionally. Because her input can be useful and the skull doesn't talk back. In this instance she was paging through my inbox for me as I contemplated an interesting drowning she'd bought (found in the Thames but the water in his lungs was concentrated _brine._)

"Do you normally get this many nudes sent to you, Holmes?" she asked, hitting the "block" button with an expression of disgust.

"How many?" I asked, from my station on the sofa.

"Uh, four."

"That _is_ actually rather a lot for twenty-four hours."

Sally raised an eyebrow at me, and I responded, "What? I'm extremely famous and have a public email address. It happens."

"_Anyway_," she muttered, resuming her search, "Oooh, this one is encoded."

Far more interested than in the nudes, I stood up and read the string of random letters grouped into fives from over her shoulder.

"Oh, brilliant," I exclaimed, "_Porlock!_"

"Who?"

I grinned.

"He's _the weakest link_," I replied, rising to my feet, flinging the drawer of my desk open and rummaging around, "In fact the _only _weak link that I have been able to trace in the Moriarty organization thus far."

Sally eyeballed me from her seat on John's chair, and eventually said, "No, you're definitely fat and old, it's _not_ 2011 again. I think that I vaguely recall Moriarty shooting himself in the head on the roof of Barts Hospital that year. Seems like there was a bit of fuss at the time."

I scowled at her. I am not by even the loosest possible interpretation of the word "fat," I simply no longer have the body of a twenty-nine year old heroin addict.

"John Kennedy was shot in the head. The United States continues-"

"Sort of," Sally muttered.

"_A man," _I continued, ignoring her interruption, "Died on the roof of the morgue, and despite the passage of nearly twenty years you have never been able to identify him. That doesn't mean that _Moriarty_ is gone. Simply in the wind."

I'd got her attention now.

"You haven't identified him either," Sally said slowly, "Unless you've neglected to mention it."

I shrugged.

"Irish, probably, is about as much as I'm willing to venture about _him_. He may well have been the original… certainly every method I've tried to find any of his past has come up empty. Or maybe he was an extraordinarily loyal lieutenant… because Moriarty certainly hasn't gone. He's _everywhere._"

I found the notepad I'd been looking for and pulled off the top page, before taking my laptop from Sally.

"And I cannot for the life of me figure out who he is. He's been _seen_. And he's never the same man twice… tall, short, bearded, bald, fat, thin… black, white! Even a woman, once!" I eyeballed Sally.

"Always glad to hear about us gals breaking the glass ceiling," Sally commented.

"I cut the threads of his web, back then. But the spider kept right on weaving."

Heaving a heavy sigh for happier times, I began translating the email with the one-time pad I keep for when Porlock sends me these little treats.

"You know there's _modern_ cryptographical programs that are just as unbreakable as that," Sally ventured.

"Yes, but this is much more fun," I replied.

"So who's this Porlock, then?"

"No idea," I shrugged, "It's an alias, and that's a thread that I haven't opted to pull at yet. He's only relevant in the sense of the much bigger fish that he swims with. He's got some sort of rudimentary understanding of right and wrong, which when lubricated by the occasional infusion of cash from me encourages him to send me these missives."

With that, I busied myself.

"D-a-n-g-e-r," I translated, letter by letter, "Birlstone- House - Birlstone. Sachi-C-h-a-n-d-r-a-"

"Chandrasekar," Sally said, with a sigh, handing me her mobile, "Found shot to death in his home late last night. We're too late."

I scanned the Scotland Yard wire update app, and raised an eyebrow.

"Neat," I said.

"Okay, Holmes, that, right there, is why people keep thinking you might be a serial killer-" Sally huffed.

* * *

With the recommendation of a detective inspector (who was pleased to be informed precisely _where_ in the process of _which _desalination plant her _own_ murder victim had been offed) I was put into contact with local police in that part of Sussex and traveled out there.

John always tells me that it's the decorative details that intrigue the reader and set the stage for the story. This is highly inefficient. The details that _matter _are that Chandrasekar was in his late forties, rich, fairly new to the area, married to a much younger woman who was (according to local gossip, anyway) possibly shagging his best friend, who had been the one to report the crime. The murder had been committed with a sawed-off shotgun found at the scene, destroying his face. _I _then discovered interesting clues which led me to investigate a surprising avenue...

Fine.

Birlstone House is a Napoleonic era fortification tower surrounded by a wide but shallow moat, near the village of Birlstone, located in upscale "country house retreat" territory near the northern border of Sussex. Sachi Chandrasekar had located there with his wife some five years previous after three years of extensive renovations had converted it into a well-appointed, modern, and elegant home.

Chandra (as he was inevitably referred to by his wealthy parochial neighbors) had made his money in software and was now retired young and living off his investments. They were nominally well liked in the area, though within ten minutes of arriving I was regaled with a variety of spiteful gossip, most of which seemed to be derived from his "non-Englishness" (read: brownness, he appears to have been thoroughly English in every other aspect), marriage to an English (read: white, her name was Eleonora and despite her correct accent if she wasn't born in Poland I'll eat my own head) woman some twenty years his junior, obvious wealth, and the suspicious presence of a young and handsome friend, Cecil Barker.

Barker was much more an "our sort" type, and apparently the only friend who had known Chandra before he'd relocated to the area. A tall and fit man in his late thirties, he attended all of the Chandrasekar's social occasions, introduced the man of the couple to the local hunt, and apparently ignored all the blithe speculation that he was Nora Chandra's gigolo.

He'd phoned in the murder.

"It was about half eleven. I was getting ready for bed when I heard the shot," he told me, as he stood outside the drawbridge that served as the house's only door and the police milled around the place, "It was very loud. I hurried down the stairs, and I saw that he was… he was lying as he is."

Barker cleared his throat. He was pale, but composed.

"Did you see anyone else in the room?" I asked.

"No," Barker replied, "I heard Nora coming down the stair after me and I went to stop her so she wouldn't have to see him like that. When the housekeeper came down and took her back upstairs, I went back in."

"Is this drawbridge always kept down?" was my next question.

"No, it was up. Chandra always raised it at sunset unless they were expecting company."

"Meaning that if you came down almost instantly upon hearing the shot, he must have departed through the window and across the moat?"

Barker nodded.

"I probably could have seen him if I'd gone to the window. I wish to God-"

He rubbed a hand across his mouth, looking sick to the stomach.

"Mr. Holmes," a young uniformed constable interrupted us, "We're ready to move the body. If you'd care to investigate the scene before we do…?"

I nodded, and followed him into the depths of the house.

The crime scene was a small but fully equipped home gym. Features of interest included one absent five-pound hand weight from the rack near the door and the corpse with his entire face blown off.

Chandrasekar had apparently been a fit and healthy man, and was wearing loose trackies and a sleeveless compression vest. I noticed that the chalk fairies that tend to show up at rural crime scenes had been active, and the body had been carefully outlined. But the smudging of blood was rather distinctive, and I inquired of the constable, "Has he been moved since he was found?"

"No, sir."

Which meant, of course, that he'd been moved _before_ his official discovery.

"How was the identification made?"

"Mr. Barker knew the clothes, sir. And if you look at the tattoo on his arm?"

I had. It was simple and rather stylized, four circles close-packed into an equilateral triangle.

"I've seen that myself, sir, many a time. He used to always come down the church fair and play the lucky dip with his shirtsleeves rolled up."

I eyed the constable, who was looking rather teary-eyed, and started to wonder how difficult it would be to draft Sally into getting the Met's Rural Crimes division to handle this case. As I've aged I've grown to see the merits of sentiment, but it still doesn't bloody belong at a crime scene.

The murder weapon was a sawed off shotgun with both triggers wired.

"Not much of a weapon for a planned murder," I mused aloud, "Clumsy. Large."

The constable shrugged.

"It's good hunting country. A lot of people have them 'round these parts, might've just been what they had about the place. We'll run it through the database but it's old enough it might not be on there. And look here, sir."

He escorted me over to the room's one small, open window, a six foot drop above the shallow moat.

Dead center in the middle of the stone sill was a single footprint, left in the murdered man's blood.

I do like it when criminals try to stage their scenes for me. I especially like it when they do something stupid like try to imply that they hopped on one unbloodied foot the ten feet from the corpse to the window.

"Interesting," is all I said, "And the moat is shallow, or deep?"

"Shallow," was the reply, "No more than three feet at the deepest."

"Very good," I said, "I believe I'm done here. You can take him away."

The paramedics who had been lingering outside were duly summoned, and the sad remains of Mr. Chandrasekar were lifted into a body bag, at which point I noticed something small that had been concealed beneath the body.

"What's that, Mr. Holmes?" asked the constable curiously, as I picked it up with a gloved hand.

"A USB drive-" I said, turning it slowly in my hands, "You're probably too young to have seen one before… I haven't encountered one myself in-"

I sighed. The writing was faded, but still quite legible.

_A.G.R.A._

"In a very long time."

(Author's notes: Old school Sherlock Holmes aficionados will notice now that the case in this story is based off Conan Doyle's "The Valley of Fear.")


	4. The persistence of memory (John)

Rosie had been in London for three days now, and it turned out I sucked at this.

I'd met Rosie's guardian, Senora Florencia, an elderly lady who grudgingly brought Rosie to visit with me and didn't speak _any_ English, although she didn't give the impression of having much to say even if she had. She dropped Rosie off every morning and picked her up every night and generally emitted a vibe of low-grade hatred.

(I asked Rosie how long she'd been with her, and she got all sad and quiet and said, "A little while now" and I silently flipped my shit and started googling solicitors who specialized in international child custody cases.)

Because I liked her. You're supposed to _love_ your kids, and I wanted to, but…

I liked her. I liked that she was obviously too smart for her own good. I liked that she was independent and curious and pretty, just like her mum.

I wasn't, honestly, a fan of her clothes. I normally love miniskirts on women but seeing them on my daughter had made me realize that all men are predatory scumbags and made my fingers itch for a cricket bat.

She also kept calling me "sir," and I couldn't quite muster up the sack to say, "You can call me Dad, if you want?"

Anyway I had absolutely no idea what to do with a surprise teenaged daughter so I went on blind relative-in-town default and kept taking her to tourist attractions. That day we'd done Westminster Abbey (she liked the tombs), the Eye (she wasn't a fan of the heights) and the Aquarium (which I think she enjoyed but _I _had thought we were a world class city and it was absolute garbage).

It was a bit bitter, honestly. London _should _have been Rosie's city. She should have been bored out of her mind as I squired her around things she'd already seen on dozens of class field trips and enriching family activities. Instead she was wide-eyed and excited and taking hundreds of selfies at interesting landmarks.

"It's not at all like home. It's so big," she said, smiling, as she tore into her fish and chips. Another thing I hadn't realized about teenaged girls is how much they need to eat just to remain upright and functional, "And so many _people._"

"Is this your first time away from home?" I asked.

"We went to Rio when I was ten, and then Buenos Aires when I was twelve. My class at school is going to New York City next term and mum says… _said_… that I can go on that."

And then there was that. The bloody _repeated _misuse of tenses.

"I've never been to South America," I replied, "But New York is really cool."

'Really cool' I said to my daughter, because I had no idea how not to sound like a twat.

"Do you like it where you live? In… Montevideo?" I asked.

Rosie shrugged.

"It's okay, I guess. We have a nice house, pretty near the beach. And the women's football team took third at the World Cup."

"You like football?"

She nodded.

"I'm a wing-back, on my school's team."

"You're kidding," I grinned, "That's what _I _played, when I was at school."

"Really?" she smiled, a wide white Mary Morstan smile, "Mum _totally _doesn't get sport. She never understands… understood."

Tenses, again. And I have known Sherlock Holmes for twenty years and have therefore learned the value of letting people continue to dig. I just asked, "You any good at it?" and she said, "I'm the best in my class" and was cuter than just about anything.

After second luncheon we went to Kensington Gardens and walked around-

("Who is this bit for?"

"It's the Princess Diana memorial."

"Who's she?"

Jesus, I was getting old.)

And talked.

"So you're… just like a regular doctor?" she asked.

"Actually these days I don't practice, though I keep my license up. The cases and the writing keep me busy. But yeah, I was, when I knew your mum, a regular GP. I'd been a surgeon, but I got shot in the shoulder, in Afghanistan, and I never got back all my dexterity."

"I think I might be a doctor. I'm pretty good at school, and mum thinks it'd be a good job for me-"

"What does _she _do for a living?" I asked mildly.

"Well she used to be a midwife, but now she has-"

"A job," I interrupted, "Which most people don't actually have when they're dead."

Rosie stopped dead in her tracks and flushed a brilliant crimson, before starting to wring her hands together again, and stammering, "I didn't technically _say_ that she was dead…"

"Yeah," I agreed, "But you did bloody well imply it. Did she not want to talk to me? Is that why she didn't come out with you?"

"Um…" Rosie mumbled. A dire thought came to my mind.

"Rosie-" I asked, "Who's Senora Florencia?"

"She's a Lyft driver. I met her at Gatwick Airport and put her on retainer," she said quietly.

"Oh, Jesus Christ. You… ran away? _Does your mother know where you are?_"

"I mean- She was being such a complete bitch to me about-"

"God, she's going to _kill_ us," I exclaimed. Quite possibly literally. "Rosie, get your mobile out and _phone_ her, now."

"Um-"

"Right now, young lady!"

This stern paterfamilias act felt like absolute bullshit, but apparently Rosie fell for it, because she fumbled her mobile out of her pocket and dialed. Glancing guiltily at me, she said quietly, "Hola mama" when it rang through.

I could faintly hear Mary's voice, as they started off in a rapid-fire conversation in Spanish, Rosie's primary language which, ha ha, I don't actually speak.

As for me… I was thinking. And looking around the sunny gardens, at the people walking past, the children playing.

They talked for a few minutes, until Rosie switched back to English, and asked, "Did you want to talk to him?"

I didn't hear Mary's answer. But Rosie didn't hand over the phone so I suppose I knew what it was.

Eventually they rang off.

"She says," Rosie began, "That I can stay until my return ticket."

This time, I could tell, she wasn't lying, "When's that?"

"A week. I have to get back to school after easter holidays."

"Okay," I said, rubbing my nose, "Where are you staying?"

"The Holiday Inn, in Camden Lock."

"Right. We'll go and get you checked out of there, and you can take the spare room at mine."

Rosie nodded solemnly, and we headed out of the park.

As we got to the gates, though, I pulled my own mobile out of my pocket, and muttered, "Damn."

"What?"

"I- look, are you all right getting yourself checked out and getting back to my place? Something's just come up."

She agreed, and I put her in a cab (a black cab, apparently Lyft drivers being too easy to suborn) and sent her off with my address, my house key, and strict instructions to behave herself.

And then I loitered. Not for very long, until what I was expecting to happen… happened. A small woman came out of the gates from where I'd just emerged. She had long chestnut hair done up in a knot, wore a plain blue pantsuit, and carried an enormous handbag. Stepping to the sidewalk, she was raising a hand to summon a cab when I cleared my throat behind her.

"Hello, Mary."


	5. The Swan of Bayswater (John)

Mary sighed, turned around to face me, and took off her oversized sunglasses.

"Either you've got a lot better or I've got a lot worse. I didn't think you'd spotted me."

"I didn't," I grinned, "But I tried to picture a world where _you'd _let a fifteen year old girl run halfway around the world by herself and not do anything about it and I couldn't _quite_ manage. So I waited around."

Mary frowned at me. She really hadn't changed much. The lines were a bit deeper but she was still small and slight and pretty. It made me uncomfortably aware of the fact that the last time she'd seen _me_ I still had color in my hair.

"I raised Rosie _properly_," she snapped, "She's perfectly capable of traveling to a country like England on her own. I came along after her because I wasn't sure _you_ weren't going to be a problem."

She folded her arms and glared up at me.

"Are you, John?"

"I don't want to be."

The fight seemed to drain out of her, and her shoulders sagged slightly.

"We should probably talk," she said.

"Yeah, probably. Want a drink?"

"God, yes."

We crossed the road and went to a pub, built in an old coaching inn, which bustled with the after-work crowd. I was able to snag us a tiny two-top table in the corner. Mary sat, and I asked, "You still a Bombay and tonic with lime?"

For the first time, Mary looked uncertain.

"Actually, nowadays gin sort of... upsets my stomach? Just a glass of whatever their house white is will be fine."

I collected myself as I went up to the bar and ordered a glass of sauvignon blanc and a double Macallan, which, yes, admittedly _was_ going to sort of upset my stomach later on, but I felt it was needed.

I brought our glasses back to the table and sat.

"It's…"

"It's good to see you," was what I started to say, but that didn't seem to cover it, so instead I said, "You look good. You haven't changed a bit."

Mary eyebrowed me in that way that she used to, "Apparently you're still a horrible flatterer. And we have a kid together."

"We do," I agreed, firmly. Mary smiled a bit.

"She's… she's actually really great. I like her a lot. And she's tall! How the hell did you and I make a tall kid?" I continued.

Mary shrugged.

"I don't know about you but I was always the runt of the litter in my family. Both my brothers were over six foot."

That was a reminder. The Mary I'd known, the orphan… never really existed, had she? This one had a _family._

"You didn't exactly sprint out to let me know where Rosie was," Mary coolly interrupted my thoughts, taking a sip of her wine.

"Well, yeah, 'cause she said you were dead," I agreed.

Mary stared at me, "She said I was… Oh that lying little … argh! And you believed her?"

"Not… really. Not after a bit. She's not all that-" I hesitated.

"She turns beet red and has a mini meltdown whenever she fibs, yeah," Mary smirked, "That one's on _you._"

"Oi!" I chuckled, "I can lie perfectly well, I just spend enough time with Sherlock that it's not usually worth the effort."

"I did actually try to teach her some of the… of the craft, you know. Just for her own protection. But really none of it's stuck. Like apparently she didn't realize that taking a new Mastercard out in my name and then _immediately_ booking an international flight would send up some serious red flags with the credit reporting agencies."

I leaned my hand on my chin.

"Is that seriously how she did that?"

"Yeah. I actually came over on the same flights as her. Though I went business class."

"Do you know _why_ she did it?"

Mary sighed, and toyed with the paper coaster under her glass.

"Her adolescence hit her like a freight train about six months ago, and now she hates me," she said, with false brightness, "We're rowing all the time. About _everything_. Her marks, her clothes-"

"Yeah, she does dress a bit come-and-get-it-" I agreed.

"Smoking-"

"Wait, she _smokes_?"

"Boys-"

"_Boys?!_"

Mary chuckled.

"She came to her senses pretty quickly about Enzo the fuckwit. And I'm pretty sure she's only _tried_ smoking the one time. She's a lovely little person, really, just-"

In unison, we said, "She takes after me."

There was a brief silence, and for just a second we smiled at one another, like we used to.

"Has she been arrested at all?" I asked.

"Well… I mean, _no_, obviously not," Mary frowned, "Had _you_ been arrested when you were her age?"

"Yeah. Couple of times," I said ruefully.

"Whatever for?"

"Um- those ones would have been for disorderly conduct and fighting."

"Those ones?" Mary asked, looking over the rim of her glass at me.

"I wasn't… exactly the best kid. That's why I went into the Army, they thought it'd help me straighten up."

"I thought you went into the Army so they'd pay for your medical school?"

"Gosh, that does sound like a much sexier version, which I might deploy on someone whose pants I was hoping to get into as an alternative to 'the judge said it was that or Borstal.'"

Mary laughed quietly. I took a drink of my scotch, feeling that good tightness in my throat that comes with the first sip.

"To be fair," she mused, "I certainly had done things that I _could _have been arrested for when I was fifteen. I just never _was_. Too clever."

"Yeah, clever isn't usually a good description of teenage boys."

"Rosie's clever. But she's not…" Mary hesitated, "In a lot of other ways she's _not _like me. She's gentler, and tenderer. Better. And she's given you the opportunity to really hurt her, John."

The question was there, unsaid.

"I won't."

"Good."

"I've sent her back to her hotel to pick up her bags, and then she's going to meet me at the house. Our house. Do you want to come by there too?"

Mary thumbed her mobile on, and pulled up an app.

"Rosie is _not_ heading over to her hotel," she said, musingly, "At least not yet."

"Do you seriously have tracking software on her phone?" I asked, "That seems a bit intrusive."

"Well, I didn't, then she stole my identity, robbed me of about a hundred fifty thousand pesos, and started planning to flee the continent. So yes, watch me intrude. She's at someplace called "The World's End." I'm guessing that's a pub?"

"Rosie's not old enough to go in pubs by herself," I said, feeling a slow, sinking sensation.

"She easily looks eighteen. Welcome to parenting a teenager," Mary smiled, "And no. I'm going to let her do this on her own. She's starting to stretch her wings. I don't want to clip them unless I have to… which is the approach I advise you to take too."

"You just… you're just leaving, then?"

_Again_. I fiddled with my ring.

Mary shrugged. "I suppose I _could,_ if you two are working it out all right, but I might stick around for a while anyway. Have a bit of a shop, take in a West End show. I've missed London. I work for myself now so I can take the time off."

"What _are _you doing these days?" I asked curiously.

"I consult out for _Mara Salvatrucha_. Infiltration, intimidation… a little light enforcement, nothing major."

"That's-" I hesitated, then noticed the hint of a smile around her eyes, "That's total bullshit, isn't it?"

Mary laughed.

"I'm not even sure if _Mara Salvatrucha _is _in_ Uruguay. I think they're El Salvadorean. No, actually, I finished up my midwifery qualification when Rosie was a baby, and I did that for a while. Then eight years ago I bought a yoga studio. Now I own three of them."

I swallowed. She always had been rather… bendy.

"Third career, huh?"

"I mean technically I was also a hat check girl, a babysitter, and a waitress at one point too," she said, "But yes. I told you. I was done. I wanted some peace, and I finally got it."

There was some defiance in her face, but also… peace. Serenity. A nice quiet life doing nice quiet things.

"I'm glad for you."

"I'm glad too," she agreed.

Her glass of wine was only half-drunk, but she rummaged in her purse for her wallet and pulled out a twenty-pound note and a pen. Setting the cash on the table, she scribbled her number on a coaster.

"You can call me, if you need anything. I suppose… I suppose we have to start acting like adults about this. Visitation and so forth?"

"Sixteen years of back child support..." I mused.

"Ooooh," Mary smiled, "That'd be a bit of all right. Yes, that sort of thing. But you can see how it works with the two of you, and we'll go from there."

She stood, and smiled sadly.

"It was good seeing you, John," she murmured. As she was leaving, she hesitated, "And you look good too."

With which she left, leaving me alone at my table, the bustle of the pub going on around me.


	6. The Great Detective (Rosie)

My father lived in a small white townhouse at the end of a quiet street, in a decent neighborhood called "Maida Vale." It was actually a lot like our house at home, and I wondered if my mother had lived there, or picked it out. It was _really_ tidy.

There were two bedrooms, even though it was just him. Mine was normally his office, but he pulled the couch out for me to sleep on. It was weird, thinking… if this had been my home, my room, all my life, what would I have been?

The morning after, he cooked me a whole breakfast. The bacon was really weird and the sausage was foul but apparently it was a "whole English" which was important and so I ate it all. We sat at the table in the kitchen and he was telling me what we were going to do today, "I thought you might like to go to Stonehenge. It's a bit of a hike but-"

Just then the front door opened with a loud bang. A tall, thin man, with dark hair greying at the temples, stalked in declaiming, "Your tragic sex life will have to wait, John, something _important_ has-"

Then he stopped dead in his tracks, and raised a faintly shaking hand to his mouth.

My father sighed, ran a hand through his hair, "Yeah. Told you I was busy. Sherlock, this is-"

The man took two steps forward, enveloped my hand in both his enormous ones, and started pumping it vigorously, "Miss Echevarria, it is _such_ a pleasure to finally meet you. I'm Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes. I'm your godfather."

"No, you aren't," my father said, his eyebrows crinkling up.

"Well, I would have been," Sherlock dismissed that, still shaking my hand and grinning widely down at me, "Had your parents been able to get their lives in order properly. Good God. You're _tall_. I hadn't realized you were tall! How on earth did you manage that, John?"

"Hang on," my father said, "You… you know Rosie's name. You recognize who she is?"

The tall man dropped my hand at that and looked guilty.

"Ah-"

"_How?_" Dad spat.

Sherlock raised an eyebrow, "Oh, sorry, didn't introduce myself to _you_, did I? Sherlock Holmes. You and I have been best friends for twenty years, during which interval you might have had occasion to note that I'm _pretty_ decent at finding people, particularly people who have left behind a flash drive that contains (among other things) a complete list of their known aliases."

"Known aliases?" I asked bewilderedly. But Dad and Sherlock were _not _paying attention to me.

"Why?" Dad asked.

"I made a vow," Sherlock shrugged, "You remember. It seemed best to keep occasional tabs on them to make sure everything was coming along all right."

"You never said a _word_," Dad shouted. Since when did he shout?

"Well you never-"

Sherlock stopped himself, and cleared his throat.

With the unsaid "asked" hanging about in the room like smoke, Sherlock bulled forward, saying, roughly, "Actually, this is quite convenient. Where's your mother? I need to speak with her."

"Um, she's back home. In Uruguay."

"Ummmm…." Dad said.

Thus about half an hour later I was facing down my mum. Who I had just robbed and run away from. _And_ I had the sudden realization that I was wearing a skirt that we'd had a screaming row over and she had called "a wide belt."

She looked up at me, with sad eyes. Then she asked quietly, "Are you all right, my darling?"

I nodded, feeling a prickle of tears, and she folded me in her arms. Her hug, and the smell of her perfume, made me feel safe in a way that I hadn't been since leaving home.

"Though you're still in deep shit over this, just incidentally," she said when she let me go, "Hi, Sherlock. You've kept your hair."

Sherlock looked down his nose at her.

"You remain moderately presentable."

Then he chuckled and enveloped her in an embrace, which seemed to startle her.

"Are _you_ all right, Sherlock?" she asked, muffled by his chest.

"Course I am. I've _been_ all right. Silly woman."

With that he let her go, and we sat around dad's coffee table as he related the story of the murder of Sachi Chandrasekar. As he got to the climax, he reached into the pocket of his coat which he'd casually slung over the back of the sofa, and pulled out a little rectangular gizmo.

"An AGRA flash drive?" Dad asked.

"Not your one, I take it," Sherlock said.

Dad got up, searched through the top drawer of his desk, and pulled out an identical… flash drive, I guess.

"Nope."

"I found this under the body of the dead man, Mary," Sherlock said, watching her face. It was weird watching her be called someone else's name. She was _Aurelia,_ and-

"And you just took it. From the crime scene?" Dad interrupted.

"Yes, they're strikingly inadequate cops. The Met's going to take it over but before the competency squad arrives we've got some time on our hands. The murdered man, Mary, also had a tattoo, that looked like this."

Sherlock took a notepad and quickly sketched out a drawing: four circles, arranged in a square, with a triangle surrounding all of them.

"That's your tattoo," Dad said to Mum.

"Yours and _Ajay's_," I said, "On his arm?"

"Exactly," Sherlock agreed.

"Yeah, Ajay. From when I was little. He had that. Do you think it's him?" I asked my mother, who folded her hands together in front of her chin, frowning.

"You have matching tattoos with somebody?" Dad asked, frowning.

"Mmm," Mum agreed absently, "I haven't seen Ajay in probably nine years. I had no idea he was in England."

"Under an assumed name," Sherlock said, "Should I assume that he was one of your… more interesting associates?"

"One of the most interesting," Mum agreed.

"I'd like it if you can come out with me to Birlstone. Both of you. This case is more intriguing than I'd originally thought."

"Cool!" I said. This was going to be fun.

"Not you, Rosie," Mum and Dad said, simultaneously.

They looked at each other in surprise. Mum cleared her throat, and confirmed, "You're not going to a murder scene, darling."

"We can't just leave her by herself," Dad said slowly.

"Oh my God, Dad. I am _fifteen_," I exclaimed.

"And you nip off to the pub when there's not eyes on you," he said calmly, which… I hadn't known he'd known that, "Is Molly in town?"

"No, she's out at the cottage, the girls are on their Easter holidays. But we can drop Rosie there, it's not terribly far out of our way."

"I do _not _need a babysitter," I said. Everyone ignored me.

"Oh, it'll be nice to see Molly again," Mum said, smiling, "How is she?"

"I believe Doctor Hooper is quite well," Sherlock said.

"Oh," Mum said, "You two aren't… friendly, anymore?"

"Oh by no means," Sherlock replied, "We're quite friendly and she remains the most highly skilled pathologist of my acquaintance. Her assistance as chief pathologist at Barts morgue is routinely very valuable to me as I go about my work."

"Right," Mum said shadily, "And I read that her eldest got into Cambridge at _thirteen_!"

"She's bloody well not going," Sherlock snorted, "Do you know what happens when you take someone whose emotional maturity is far lower than their IQ and send them off to mix with a bunch of people half a decade older than them at a university which _still_ is mostly about preparing people to hobnob with the aristocracy?"

"Um-" Mum began.

"I'll tell you. You get an eighteen year old twerp with a master's degree, a drug addiction, and a _penchant _for calling themselves a high-functioning sociopath. No, Doctor Hooper was quite correct in opting to keep Isabelle at home for a few more years. The local university will allow her to take courses without shoving her completely off the deep end of adulthood just yet."

"It's funny…" My mother mused, "Because after I saw that article I went and looked Molly up a bit more…"

"Funny how?" Sherlock said warily.

"Oh, it was just rather striking that short, brown-haired brown-eyed Molly Hooper managed to produce not one but _three _girls-"

"Girls are a superior genetic investment, much more likely to successfully propagate one's DNA," Sherlock pronounced, "Certainly Rosie has made that clear to you even if the literature wasn't entirely obvious."

"_All _of who look really quite tall, with great big curly black hair and blue eyes."

Sherlock glared severely down his nose at her and said, "I don't know what you're implying, Mary, but you should stop it at once. It's quite clear to everyone that I disdain the softer emotions, and eschew human attachment as a sign of weakness and foolishness."

"Mmm," Mum chuckled, "Yes, I _did_ read the books.


	7. Interlude: Spy Girls (Ajay)

_Spring 2016_

She smiled at me. That's what I remember, when she came to the door and saw my face. She'd aged, changed her hair to a dark lob, gotten softer around the middle, but the smile hadn't changed a bit in seven years.

She smiled, widely, and disbelievingly gasped, "Oh, my GOD, Aj-"

Then the smile dropped off her face, and her eyes went to the gun in my hand.

"Ajay…" she said carefully, backing away slowly, "What are you doing?"

"Oh, Rose," I grinned savagely, "I've been looking forward to this for longer than you can imagine."

"Okay, whatever it is you think is going on here," she said, "You've got it _wrong._ If I…"

"You betraying _bitch_," I spat.

"Ajay, I thought you were _dead_," she exclaimed, continuing to step backwards, "If I'd had _any_ idea I'd have come back for you, you have to know that!"

"I've dreamed of killing you, ever night, for seven years," I said, "Squeezing the life out of your lying throat."

She'd gone very pale, and as she backed away her hip bumped into an occasional table up against the wall. A glass vase wobbled, and fell to the floor, shattering into pieces with a loud crash.

And a second later, a high pitched wail started up from one of the rooms.

"Mummmaaaaa!"

I blinked. I couldn't help it.

"_You_ had a fucking kid?"

Shouldn't have blinked. Because one of the things about Rose is that she moves like a snake and _really_ doesn't like being cornered. In that split second where I was distracted she'd stepped within my guard, grabbed hold of my gun hand and started slamming it against the wall, each time with a shrill shriek like Serena Williams serving an ace.

The gun fell from my nerveless fingers to the floor. It had been too long for me, and I cursed my own slowness. I should have taken her out at a distance, I thought, as she swept my legs from under me and got me into a chokehold.

"Go to sleep," she growled, "Go to sleep."

And I did, aided by her pressure on my carotid and accompanied by her baby's screams.

* * *

I came to lying on on a ratty sofa, practically mummified with clothesline and gagged with what I would shortly find out was a cheap imitation Hermes scarf. Rose had always been good at improvised restraints. The light was still slanting steeply through the western windows, so it hadn't been too long. In another room, Rose was singing, accompanied by the creak of a rocking chair.

"Honey in the rock, and the sugar don't stop, gonna bring a bottle to the baby."

In the years I'd known her, I'd never heard her sing before. She was terrible at it.

"Come lay your bones on the alabaster stones," she sang in a cracked, pitchy voice, "And be my ever-loving baby."

Having finished her lullaby, she walked into her living room and picked up my gun from atop the coffee table.

"If I ungag you, Ajay," Rose began mildly, "Are you going to bite me, or wake up my daughter again?"

I glared at her, but shook my head in a no. Aiming the gun at me, she plucked the scarf out of my mouth. I tried to get some saliva flowing again. Rose sat in a worn director's chair across from me and took my flash drive out of her pocket.

"Is John Watson still alive?" she asked me in a low voice.

"What?"

"When you took this from John, _did you kill him_?" Rose insisted.

"You gave yours… to _him_?"

"Yes. It turned out to be a fairly serious miscalculation. This one isn't mine?" she asked.

"It's _mine_," I growled, "I got out ... for a while. Long enough to hide my memory stick. I didn't want that to fall into their hands. I was loyal, you see; loyal to my friends. _Mine_ was safe, for six years. But they took me, tortured me. Not for information. Not for anything except fun."

I laughed, despite myself.

"Why would I kill John Watson? We both got fucked and fucked over by you, we might as well be brothers. He was fine, when I saw him. Got himself a sweet little ginger girlfriend," I leered.

Rose flinched a bit at that, and then let out a slow breath, nearer a sigh, and said, "All right then, so let's talk about that bit. Exactly why do you want to kill me?"

I couldn't believe she sheer bareface nerve of her, and cursed, "You fucking… do you know how long they kept me prisoner; what they did to me? They tortured Alex to death. I can still hear the sound of his back breaking."

Rose lifted the hand not holding the gun to cover her mouth.

"God, Alex survived too?"

"Until he didn't. And it's all thanks to you. You sold us out."

"Ajay," she said, her wide eyes filling with tears, "I would never. I never _did_. Who said I did?"

"They did," I replied, "Every day as they tore into me. Ammo. _Ammo._ Ammo."

Rose frowned, her forehead creasing, "Ammo? Like ammunition? They didn't say my name?"

"Oh for fuck's sake, Rose," I began, but she hushed me.

"Shhh. Don't wake the baby."

For some goddamn reason I lowered my voice. She was holding a gun, after all, "I know you never used your _name_. You're not stupid. They said it was a traitor. _The English woman_."

Setting the gun down on the table again, she rubbed her hands over her face.

"What a mess. What a _goddamned _mess."

She looked at me curiously.

"I should really just kill you, shouldn't I? It's what I _do _to people who want to kill _me_."

Rose sighed.

"Except you _know _me. No matter what you think about me right now, you know me. You know, deep down, that I would never have sold us out."

With a bitter laugh, she gestured, "I mean, look around you, does it _look _like I sold you out?"

And for the first time, doubt crept into my mind. Because she was living in a really cheap apartment in a sketchy neighborhood, and giving away three quarters of AGRA would have been worth… God only knew how much. Where had that money gone?

"Nobody else knows me. Nobody has for seven years. Only one man ever even really came close to knowing me."

(I asked her, later, if she'd meant her husband. She just shook her head and said, "No, not him, someone else.")

Rising to her feet she walked out of my sight, presumably into the kitchen because she came back with a wickedly-sharp looking eight inch knife.

She stood over me, the knife glittering in the late-afternoon light.

"And I know you, Ajay. And you'd never hurt an innocent person."

Without any further ado, she knelt in front of me and cut the cords binding my wrists. Then Rose looked into my eyes and asked, "So now what?"

* * *

_Winter 2017_

"This role is going to be different from any other you've taken in your career. My reports on you suggest you've been an unmatched field agent, and you'll need those skills… but being his assistant _also_ requires perfect attention to detail, an encylopedic knowledge of intelligence and politics, and a willingness to go off-piste at a moment's notice. He is demanding, a perfectionist, and his family is very much involved and they're absolute bloody nightmares"

Andrea sighed, leaned back in her chair and rested her hand on her extraordinarily pregnant belly.

"Fortunately, you won't be doing it for long. I'm not planning to take a day more leave than they force me to take. But it's an excellent opportunity for your career. You'll be in at the very upper echelons of the agency."

At that moment a tall, thin, balding man came into the posh office, and Andrea struggled to her feet. I also rose and extended a hand to help her (I'd rather have extended an obstetrical flying squad, she looked about ready to burst), but she brushed me off and smiled smoothly.

"Mr. Holmes," she began, "I'd like to introduce Vihaan Agarwal. He'll be taking over for me while I'm away."

Mycroft Holmes looked me up and down with a beaky, clear gaze.

"I see," he said, "Welcome, Mr. Agarwal. Tea, strong, black, no sugar, with lemon, if you would. Andrea, if you can bring me the briefing packet on the Sudan into my office?"

"Yes, sir," Andrea and I said in unison.

Notes: Eagle eyed readers will notice that I stole a hell of a lot of Ajay and Mary's dialogue from "The Six Thatchers," written by Mark Gatiss.


	8. Advantages of high-speed passenger rail

Sherlock's gift for transport hadn't faded, and he'd managed to snag four seats _together_ for us on the always-overbooked high-speed express train out to Brighton. The whole way he happily regaled Mary with tales of the people she'd known, like Greg Lestrade (recently retired, on much-hotter wife number three), Mike Stamford (Still long-suffering and nice, having had even more children) and Mrs. Hudson ("Tragically, gone. Mrs. Hudson is no more.")

"By which of course he _means_," I interjected, "That she married again, to a bloke called Callahan, and they mostly live in Mallorca nowadays."

"He's a terrible fortune hunter."

"And she _says-_" I grinned, "That that's one of the benefits of having a fortune. He's a good twenty-five years younger than her and unless he's a really good actor, Sherlock…?"

"No," Sherlock grumbled.

"He's incredibly fond of her. It's nice. She says it's doing wonders for her joints."

'"Both sorts," Sherlock agreed. He then excused himself to take a call, and Mary excused herself to the loos. Rosie had been staring out the window, bored, for the whole trip.

"So, Rosie," I began, having had something on my mind for a while, "This guy Ajay. The dead guy. You knew him, yeah?"

"Yeah?" she agreed tentatively.

"Cause he was your mum's… boyfriend?"

"Oh. I mean, yeah, I guess. I was pretty little when he was around."

"Ah."

Rosie raised her eyebrows, and said shadily, "But mum has… she's got tons of boyfriends. There's all kinds of guys after her all the time."

She was bright red. "Are you hungry?" I asked abruptly.

Rosie _was_, despite having eaten both breakfast and lunch and drunk every drop of milk in my house, so I left her in her seat and went to find something in the dining car. As I queued up, Mary came back and stood with me.

"Hey, before we get there, I was wondering… what's the actual deal with Sherlock and Molly?" she asked quietly.

"Oh, um," I hesitated, "It's complicated."

"Oh."

"Not like you and me complicated," I explained, gesturing between us, "As best as I can see from the outside they're really happy. But you know he's not exactly the most popular boy, and the people who don't like him aren't what you'd call friendly. So officially, Sherlock Holmes, bachelor, famously lives alone at 221B Baker Street. All Molly's kids are named Hooper, she had them by AI, there's no father listed on the birth certificates, and she lives with them, out here in Sussex."

"And _unofficially-_" Mary said, nodding.

"They commute," I shrugged, "It works for them. Baker Street's his office now, although he does still sleep there when a case is keeping him in town. And they actually _are_ married, they did it when she was pregnant with Izzy. Mycroft hushed the records up, but Sherlock really wanted it."

I smiled, and added, "I was best man."

Mary beamed back, and asked, "Did they name the middle one after you?"

I scowled. This is a bit of a sore point.

"Little Joanie? I think so, it would make a lot of logical sense if she was, but Sherlock claims they chose all their names after the children of King Edward the Third."

"Edward... the Third?" Mary asked disbelievingly.

"He was king for a good long while in the thirteen hundreds. Apparently he was pretty good although his habit of giving too much property to his younger sons may have ultimately led to the Wars of the Roses."

"Right."

"And I'm _sure_," I spat, "That it's just a bloody coincidence that Isabelle was Molly's mum's name and Margaret was _Sherlock's _mum's name and Joanna would therefore seem to come out of nowhere unless Sherlock _has_ actually concealed a lifelong obsession with medieval history but he won't bloody admit it and Molly just says she's not getting involved."

Mary chuckled. I hesitated for a second. Then-

'"He's good at it, you know," I said, rocking slightly with the motion of the train.

"At what?" Mary asked.

"The whole… the whole being a dad thing," I said, "I'd been worried… I mean, people said _you and I_ rushed through it but him and Molly basically went 'official-pregnant-married' over the course of about _three months_. And it was a bigger change for him than it would be for regular people. But he's actually really good at it. Loving, patient, wise. All that stuff."

I looked out the window at the Sussex countryside whipping past us.

"Better than I would have been."

There was a silence, which Mary broke with a dry, "You know it's not actually _that _difficult to be wiser than children. They're quite dim. Remember three years ago when the trend was to film yourself snorting pepper and put it on the internet?"

"Vaguely. Rosie didn't…"

"She _did_," Mary giggled, "I had to take her to the A&E AND keep a straight face."

We stifled cackles, in the queue for the food.

"But-" Mary hesitated, "I mean, seriously, John… if I hadn't thought you'd be good at it, I'd have been out the door-"

She considered.

"I mean really only a few months before I actually _was_ out the door, come to think of it. The flat second I got that second line on the pregnancy test. That was always… it was always at least an _option_ for me."

I looked at her, studiously avoiding eye contact with me, rocking along in the same rhythm the train gave to me.

"Yeah, I kinda got that," I agreed.

"Wisdom's a piece of cake. And the love part's the easy bit," she mused, "Patience… one time when she was three I slept in and she flushed twelve of her socks down the toilet before I caught her. Flooded the whole bathroom, ruined the floor, I spent about twelve hundred pounds all in getting it fixed which I did _not_ have at that point. I had to go outside and do cleansing breaths."

Mary chuckled, and gave me an awkward "atta-boy" type punch on the shoulder.

"You'd have done fine. I know it. I knew it all along."

I had moved up to the front of the queue. Mary cleared her throat and said, smoothly, "Get Rosie a sausage roll. I'd like her to get an idea of the full horror of British food."

With that, she walked away, back to our seats.


	9. Gardening in difficult conditions

**Spring 2016**

I tossed the stick into the bin, washed my hands with soap and cold water… the water heater hadn't been replaced yet, wouldn't be until the gas lines could be certified safe. I sprinkled a few drops on my face, finger-combed through my hair, took a deep breath.

Sherlock was slumped in his chair, staring into the empty fireplace, but he craned his head to watch me as I came out of the loo.

"You are," I said, "_Actually_… right."

"Of course."

"…" I inhaled, "_How_?"

"Puffiness of the face, some mild swelling of the breasts. It's not diagnostic or anything, but it's been _indicative _at least twice now."

He scrubbed his hands over his face, smiled a thin-lipped grimace, and said, "I assume you'll be wanting a termination, then?"

My heart sank, and I stammered (he always managed to make me do that, back then), "Sherlock… I know this wasn't exactly planned, but…"

It was all too new. And I _knew_ that, logically, it probably wasn't the best thing to have a baby with someone you'd just barely been dating, whose flat was draped in construction tarps after his sister had blown it up a few months prior. But that bloody stupid second line had filled my mind with all sorts of wistful imaginings, and the entire three minutes since then had seemed so… possible.

"But you don't want children," I whispered to myself.

Sherlock climbed out of his chair, crab-walked on his knees over to me, and wrapped his arms tight around my belly. He's ridiculously tall, and even like that the curly top of his head still came to my sternum.

"Molly," he murmured into the silky fabric of my blouse, "I would have been _honored_ to be the father of your children… but this is _me, and you know better than to take this risk._"

He gripped tighter around me, "You know who I am. You know my family. Any child of mine could easily be another Eurus."

Raising a shaking hand, I curled my fingers through his hair, rested my other hand on his shoulder.

"Or… another Mycroft," I whispered, "So… officious and interfering… and brilliant. Or another Sherlock… so the best man I know. Or… I mean, frankly as a man of science you should be aware that I'm not simply a passive incubator for the Holmes homunculi, we might actually luck out and have a rather Hooperish baby."

Sherlock choked off a laugh and looked up into my eyes, with a watery smile.

"There's never going to be any guarantees, but…" I smiled down at him, "If you are willing to risk it, I would _so_ like it."

"Ridiculous, sentimental woman," he growled, rising to his feet and smothering me in his embrace.

"Overdramatic clot," I replied, sniffling back some tears of my own as I rested my cheek over his rapidly beating heart.

"You do realize this means we'll have to bring the wedding forward."

"What wedding?"

**Spring 2017**

"Shouldn't… shouldn't she get tired?" I pleaded, "I mean it burns calories. It has to. She _has_ to be getting tired."

"And to think, I was so afraid she was going to end up like my sister."

"I know."

"But I had no idea _this_ could happen."

"_I know._"

"We need to call in the cavalry."

"Sherlock, no, he's on a date."

"It kills _horses_, Molly. _Horses_."

* * *

John frowned at Sherlock.

"I'm pretty sure horse colic and human colic are two different things, Sherlock. Give her here."

With that, he tilted Izzy forward, folding her arms up, supporting her with his forearm and her chest in his palm. He made gentle swooping motions, and abruptly, miraculously, Izzy stopped screaming.

"The hell," Sherlock declared flatly, "How are you doing that?"

"Well, of course, with my advanced medical training, experience, and profound knowledge of human anatomy and physiology it's quite straightforward to examine the patient and immediately determine-"

"John-" Sherlock growled. John chuckled.

"There's a pediatrician out of California who does this, it's dead clever. Even stops them crying after their jabs. He's on youtube, you can look him up."

"I didn't know you handled pediatric patients, John," I said, shuffling (protip: never let anyone with a ridiculously oversized head touch you without at least three layers of contraception installed) back into the living room, tea in hand.

John's mouth twisted up for a moment, and then he said, lightly, "I don't. I looked this up when…"

He shrugged, and cleared his throat.

"Turned out to come in handy anyway. But now, Izzy, it's okay to scream for Daddy, because _he's_ a knobhead. But Mummy is _nice_ and so you're being _very _naughty."

The baby, ungratefully, burbled happily at this.

"Don't call her Izzy, it's _Isabelle_\- ow. Ahem. I'm sorry I interrupted your date, John," Sherlock said when I gave him a sharp nudge in the ribs.

"It's fine," John said, rubbing Izzy's back, "She doesn't much care for me. Less screamy than this one, though."

He looked over at us, the walking dead.

"Did you two want to get some sleep? I've got this. We'll watch the football, won't we, love?"

* * *

The soft murmur of the television was the only sound I could hear in my flat. I used to love this flat. I hired a decorator and everything. These days everything smelled faintly of wee and spit-up milk and the place looked like Eurus actually had set a bomb off, but at least it was quiet.

Holmes and Hooper flopped gracelessly into our unmade bed. The great detective reached out a hand and barely managed to extinguish the lamp. I curled up next to him and we embraced, limp and exhausted, in the dark.

"How old would _his _baby be?" I asked quietly.

"Just about two years, I think," Sherlock said, after consideration.

"I think he still misses it."

"I think he still misses both of them."

"Mmm," I agreed sleepily. Sherlock stroked my hair.

"He's got no idea what he's missing, the poor bastard," he whispered.

"I'm sure he especially regrets the screaming."

"Even that," Sherlock laughed softly into the dark, and that was the last thing I remembered before sleep claimed me.

**Winter 2020**

I was _so_ uncomfortable. In just about every possible manner.

1\. While I, being a little bit pregnant at the moment, was obviously neither a virgin nor inexperienced, the ultrasound probe/dildo-cam was unpleasantly wide and not exactly fun. (check)

2\. The doctor was whistling as he rummaged through my interior. The tune was "Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap" by AC/DC. (check)

3\. My husband was sulking at my head, having been expelled (by me) from the seat he had taken with the better view of my nether regions. I knew it was just his normal scientific interest, but… no. You need to maintain _some _level of mystery about these things. (check)

"I had much more fun making Izzy," I sighed.

"Isabelle. And we simply need to view it as an opportunity to have new life experiences," Sherlock replied, "_You_ got to experience general anaesthesia and a needle being passed through your vagina into your ovaries. _I_ got to experience ejaculating into tupperware. When else are we likely to have had such thrilling adventures?"

"I feel like one of us was definitely the victor in that."

The doctor cleared his throat.

"So it looks like one of them took," he said, "Which is _exactly_ what we were hoping for. Positioning looks good, size looks good, nice strong heartbeat. Ready for a look?"

Sherlock reached out and twined his fingers in mine, and I nodded, my tears queuing up. After all this time… _finally._

It was obviously still very early, so it wasn't that remarkable for anybody but us to see. Just a little tiny blob with a wee winking blip for the heartbeat.

"Little John," I whispered.

Sherlock kissed my temple, his eyes on the screen.

"Little Joanna, I think," he contradicted me.

"You can't _possibly_ know that," I retorted, "Not this early."

"Infalliable, remember," he smiled at me.

**Winter 2023**

"Told you," Sherlock said smugly, wringing out a wet flannel in the sink. I glared up at him from my seat in front of the toilet. When I'd been doing this with Izzy he'd been… _frantically_ solicitous, obsessively googling remedies, filling both flats with ginger and lemon and peppermint products, hovering over me like a mother hen. At the time I'd found it faintly annoying.

Life experience apparently makes all of us revise our opinions, and he handed me the washcloth entirely calmly. Bastard. I wiped off my sweating forehead.

"Considering how intelligent we are and how difficult it was to have Joanna it really seems like we shouldn't have done this on accident… _twice_," he commented.

"Old age and infertility should have sufficed, shouldn't they?"

"You aren't old. You're lovelier than ever," he smiled, pushing a strand of my sweaty hair out of my face.

"I _am_, though," I moaned theatrically, "And where will we even store a third?"

"I've actually been thinking about that," Sherlock said, "And I've-"

There was a knocking at the door, and we shut up. Without waiting for a reply, Izzy walked straight on in and looked at us with her light blue eyes through the tangled early-morning mop of her hair.

"Givens: mama," she said, pronouncing it m'MAH, my children ended up with such posh accents, "Is vomiting. Father is apparently assisting, _ergo_ the logical deduction is that she's with child again."

I looked up at Sherlock, who shrugged. It was much earlier than I'd have preferred to let the children know about it, but my flat is shared by multiple geniuses, and if history was any guide I'd be repeating the morning sicking up for the next month, so there wasn't much possibility of concealment.

Standing up, I gave Izzy a hug, and said, "Yes, sweetie, I am. But the sickness will pass, and I'll be okay, and then in a while you'll have a new baby brother or sister. Won't that be nice?"

We hugged for twelve seconds: six because Izzy's a strikingly empathetic child and wanted to be consoled over my being ill, four because she knows I like cuddling her even though she's rather anti the whole process, and then the final two as her patience ran out. Then she squirmed out of my embrace and looked down at my belly.

"New baby _sister_," she said, "And I believe that should be acceptable. Joanie is quite pleasant company now that she's able to participate fully in more activities."

"Joanna," Sherlock corrected her.

With that, my brilliant and bizarre eldest departed.

"Again, none of you people can _actually_ tell that," I groused.

"The odds _are_ 50/50, and she's taking advantage of a common cognitive bias in which you will recall accurate predictions and forget inaccurate ones," he smiled proudly, "It's quite precocious of her."

Sherlock filled up a water glass at the sink and offered it to me. I swished and spit.

"Anyway," he said, resuming where Izzy had interrupted us, "Mycroft has offered to let me have Musgrave, except the needed renovations would be challenging because it's _listed-_"

"Also quite possibly _haunted,_" I muttered.

"But the area's quite nice, and something a bit more move-in ready might suit."

He reached into his pocket, pulled up a website on his mobile and passed it over to me. I looked at the estate agent's listing, and raised an eyebrow.

"A 'traditional family cottage,' Mr. Ridiculous Trust Fund?" I asked.

"Excellent local schools for gifted children," he wheedled, "Admittedly a _long_ commute from London, but since your promotion you can work remotely much more than you used to. And of course I have always felt faintly emasculated that I do not provide a home for my family, which this purchase would allow me to correct."

This last was said lightly, in the way he tends to say things that actually do matter to him. I paged through the pictures of the old-fashioned kitchen with its horribly inefficient Aga (if I moved there I would _definitely_ do a carbon footprint survey posthaste), the formal dining room, the _informal_ dining room, the rolling downlands it backed onto, the kitchen garden, the _eight_ bedrooms…

"Exactly how many children are you thinking we're likely to have at this point?" I asked.

"Well at least one of those I'll want for my lab," he smiled at me, hopefully.

"We'll drive out and have a look at the weekend," I laughed. Who'd have thought I'd ever be here?


	10. The cottage (Sherlock)

At Brighton station I got the Land Rover out of the commuter lot, loaded the Watsons in, and headed off towards home. This is always a pleasant drive if you can avoid rush hour, leaving the bustle of the city behind and moving out on smaller and smaller roads into the rolling hills of southern England. I gave Rosie an interesting and informative lecture on hedgerows and the benefits they provide to both humans _and _wildlife, until we finally arrived at the cottage.

"So when you say 'cottage,' Sherlock," Mary remarked, "You mean in the sense of 'The Duke and Duchess of Sussex live in a cottage on the grounds of Windsor Castle,' it would seem?"

"Actually this place is quite a bit bigger than Frogmore Cottage, although the decor is very much not up to the same standards," I replied, pulling on to the graveled driveway.

(My cottage, in the spirit of decorative detail to intrigue the reader, is a polyglot structure, parts of which date back as far as the sixteenth century. It's two-storied, sandstone, with a red-capped tiled roof, rambles on according to no particular plan or style, and is my favorite place in all the world.)

As I parked, Margaret came around the corner from the garden and ran towards me in excitement, thick black plaits bouncing behind her. But she skidded to a halt when she saw that I was accompanied, remembered the rules around strangers, put her forefinger in her mouth, and mumbled, "Hi Mist' Holmes, Doct' Watson."

I boosted her into my arms, which took more effort than it used to. Since around Christmas she had started to stretch out of her toddler pudge and get the leggy coltish look of her older sisters. She smelled, today, of fresh hay and baby shampoo and pondwater.

"That was very good, Margaret," I said, "But it's all right. This is Mary, and this is Rosie. They belong to your uncle John."

I said this in order to annoy John, at which I was entirely successful. But Mary looked troubled and Rosie looked miserable and I realized that there was still a great deal of spadework to be done. Instead of relaxing at this news, Margaret came over all shy. She buried her face in my neck, whispering all the little secrets she had learned since I'd left home well before dawn that morning. I listened to my last child, and perhaps my sweetest, the one who hung onto tenderness in a way that both her sisters had abandoned by this age and frankly even Molly is mostly faking. In this manner I learned that the tadpoles in the pond had sprouted tiny black legs; that there was to be a church fair in a few days at which there would be a dunk tank and which Margaret would very much like to attend; and that Isabelle had that morning been obligated to suit up and go after bloody hive number nine which had decided, _again_, to swarm.

Despite all of my _intensive_ efforts to provide them with forage, ventilation, space, and everything short of thousands of individualized bee spa treatments.

"What naughty bees," I replied, "Perhaps we should just let them go if they're so fed up with being where they are."

At this point Molly, barefooted, in t-shirt and pedal pushers, came out the door to see me… and stopped dead in her tracks, wide eyed, when she saw who I had bought.

"Surprise!" I said.

"Yeah," Molly agreed, nodding.

She was clearly surprised, at least. But not… happy.

"This… is _Rosie_," I said, gesturing to the younger one, "And of course you remember Mary!"

"I do indeed," Molly said levelly.

Mary smiled shyly, "It's good to see you after all this time, Molly."

"Uh-huh," was the flat reply.

I hesitated, setting Margaret down.

"Mary and John are helping me with a case, and I'd hoped that you wouldn't mind if we dropped Rosie here while we're off doing that."

"Oh, yeah, sure, I'm happy to put her up. For dinner, is she a vegetarian like you, Mary, or was that just another lie?"

The thing about Molly is she's cute and petite and quirky so you don't always notice the sharp rocks that are just below the surface. Though I had to admit to a faint bit of masculine pride at being the possessor of a woman who could make Mary Morstan flinch.

Hesitantly, Mary said, "Um, well, Rosie has been experimenting with animal protein lately and-"

"I eat meat," Rosie spat, in one of those pointless displays of aggression at the principal woman in her life that is one of the delightful features of the adolescent girl. Which gave me an idea.

"ISABELLE," I bellowed.

From the library window, Isabelle popped her head out and squawked, "What?"

"Take the Watsons on a tour of the place. I need to speak to your mum."

A few minutes later, we were ensconced in the brick-floored kitchen, and I asked Molly, "What's the matter? I always thought that you liked Mary."

"I was very fond of Mary," Molly seethed, "And then she _shot_ you in the _chest_."

I scoffed. "Oh, come on, yes, but ages ago. I'm completely fine now."

"Says the man with a third of a liver."

"Now, Molly," I smiled, "You know the remarkable regenerative properties of the liver better than most people. It had probably regrown in full within a year!"

Molly looked up at me and emitted the concept "Murder." I thought about it for a moment.

"Excessively glib about physical risk to self?" I ventured.

"Also _patronizing_," Molly replied, "Sherlock, she stole John's _baby_."

"That's not…" I hesitated, "That's not _entirely_ accurate."

There was more murder face. I raised my hands in self defense and said, "You _told_ me that I am _allowed_ to have secrets from you as long as they don't concern our family. And they don't. They're John's secrets. And he's not… proud of all of his conduct around that time."

At that point Isabelle flounced (her preferred method of locomotion nowadays) into the kitchen, glared at us, and proclaimed, "Rosie can drive a car, and shoot a gun, and she gets to do her hair like _that_."

Molly took a deep breath in through her nose, and replied, "You will be taught to drive a car when the laws of this country allow that. You will _not_ be given a gun as they are hideously illegal in the UK, for good reason. I don't care what you do to your hair, you may shave your head if you like but if you want to do polychrome you are _not _going to get as good of results as Rosie does because your hair is dark, what are you planning on doing with the steak knives?"

Isabelle scoffed, taking the last of the knives from the drawer, and said, "Father has basically presented me with a superhero. Do you _want_ the Hoopers to be completely shown up?"

And flounced out again. We stood in silence until we could hear the solid "thunk" of the first blade into the old oak tree outside.

"Knife throwing probably _will_ impress Rosie," I commented, "Mary, being a small woman, will sensibly have avoided knifework herself and thus won't have been able to teach her."

"Yes, avoiding knife fights is very sensible for us small women," Molly agreed, "Sherlock, is that true?"

"Of course it is."

"Not the knife-fighting, you muppet."

"Oh, yes, _that_. It is. I'd figured out most of it but John filled me in on the full story a few months after Sherrinford."

"Back when he was-" and she mimed raising a glass to her lips.

"Yup," I agreed, popping the "p."

"Oh, poor Rosie," Molly sighed, "What a mess. What a goddamned mess."

She stood silently, then sighed again, "Of course it's not Rosie's fault her mother's a complete bitch."

"Atta girl."

"Did you notice Mary's copying my old hairstyle?" Molly said drily.

"You wore it better," I replied. Which was quite true. Molly had cut her soft, wavy hair off to chin length when Isabelle was at the grabby stage and had never grown it back again, despite my subtle hints that she might.

"I shouldn't have been so sharp. I got protective."

"I actually thought it was a bit sexy," I said, "Though she be but little, she is _fierce_."

Molly crooked a half-smile at me and replied, "Less with the Shakespearian short jokes, thou damned and luxurious mountain goat."

To which of course there was no appropriate reply for me to make but a bleated apologetic "Maaaaa" and a friendly nibble of her neck.

"Don't wait up for us," I said on my way out the door.


	11. The people of the narrative (Mary)

We left a scowling, discontented Rosie being eyeballed by the Holmes clones in Sherlock and Molly's palatial 'cottage,' and headed northeast. Sherlock drove, of course, but he kept looking at his mobile until John eventually snapped, made him pull off to the shoulder, and took over the wheel.

"Even apart from the _you_ component, Mary," Sherlock began, once he'd seated himself in the back, "This case was odd from the beginning. Why would the Moriarty organization-"

"Which again you have _zero_ proof actually still exists, Sherlock," John interrupted as he drove.

"I am _working_ on it," Sherlock snapped, "Be involved in a home invasion type of murder? Clearly the victim had something unusual about him. And then the crime scene had obviously been staged. Someone was trying to suggest that the murderer had escaped across the moat, but there was no disturbance on the banks where someone would have needed to climb out. And then there were my interviews with the residents of the house. I've already told you about Cecil Barker, but-"

At this point Sherlock started droning. He's never had much of an idea how to tell a story, the poor lamb. I got to meet the principal players later that day and so I _might_ just summarize here.

* * *

The _dramatis personae _were Mrs. Allen, Cecil Barker, and Eleanora Chandrasekar. Mrs. Allen was the Chandra's housekeeper, a tiny elderly lady with silver-tinsel hair and a dowager's hump. Cecil and Nora looked like they should be on the cover of "Posh Adulterer" magazine. _She_ was thirty, statuesque and exquisite, with inky hair down to her waist, porcelain skin, and bright blue eyes. _He_ was forty, with that sunburnt golden-god look that wealthy Englishmen can sometimes get if they stay off the booze… and so that few of them manage. Sixish feet, shaped like a Dorito (wide at shoulders, narrow at middle), very much a snack, as we used to say.

Oh, there was also a policeman, Inspector MacDonald, who I did _not _meet. Let's say he was in his fifties, gritty and grey, with a broad Kentish accent. We _are_ in the detective story portion of the narrative, after all.

Mrs. Allen, sobbing, relayed a story that corresponded fairly well with the one Cecil Barker had related earlier. She heard a noisy, echoing shot, came out of her room at the back of the house to see Eleanora descending the stair and Barker coming out of the exercise room. He'd taken Mrs. Chandrasekar by the arms and said, "Sachi's dead. Go back! Go back! You can't help him now!"

Nora hadn't been hurrying, and Mrs. Allen said her newly bereaved employer been quite calm as the two women had gone back up the stairs, but had started shaking once she got to her own room.

"Shock, the poor darling," the older lady had sighed.

Sherlock, who had (presumably) been lurking melodramatically along the edge of the room, then inquired, "I notice that you are wearing hearing aids. Did you have them in when you heard the shot?"

Mrs. Allen raised a hand to the small inset earbuds, and said, "No, I take them off for sleeping. They aren't very comfortable at all."

"So I'm told," Sherlock said, sparkling (I assume, as he does this to older women,) "I can never get a cup of tea after midnight any more."

* * *

"As you know," Sherlock said, "I'm not a sentimental man. But despite that I do like to think that if my _incredibly _fresh corpse were lying behind a door two feet away from _my_ wife, she wouldn't be calmly walked off by our housekeeper with no agitation or attempt to see me."

"In the case of _your_ wife she'd probably at least have professional interest in the subject," John agreed.

Sherlock cocked an elegant eyebrow and asked, "And what would _your_ wife do, John?"

John glanced guiltily at me. I looked at the plain gold band on his left ring finger where it rested on the steering wheel and gave him a faint smile.

I'd noticed it, of course, right away. It hadn't surprised me, although he hadn't mentioned… whoever she was. And clearly something was unhappy there, I'd seen no sign she was still living with him when I was over at our old house. But John, I'd always known, wasn't the kind of man who wanted to be alone.

Which was, obviously, fine. The world had moved on.

* * *

Cecil Barker basically repeated his earlier narrative. He seemed quite certain that the murderer had escaped across the moat. But beyond that, he had a _theory_.

"Sachi and I first met around ten years ago-"

"Before his marriage?" asked Inspector MacDonald.

"Several years before then. He didn't meet Nora until five or six years ago, I'd say. Well after he came back to England. This was in Ibiza. We were… both rather in with the party set," Barker smiled, ruefully, "He owned a few small clubs, I managed a few musicians… more as a hobby than a career for either of us, he'd already made his money before I knew him."

He considered his next words carefully

"I felt like Sachi never stopped looking over his shoulder. He never explained precisely why, but I always had the impression that there were people out there who wanted to hurt him. Back then we were doing brilliantly, making money hand over fist… and then one day he just sold out and left Spain. Middle of August, absolute peak of the season, just walked away. Didn't give any reason, just quit."

"Within a few weeks of that, half a dozen men came calling for him."

"What sort of men?" Sherlock inquired curiously.

"Hard men with tattoos, bad teeth. Eastern European, maybe? Armenian, Turkish, something in that general family," Barker shrugged.

"Criminal, would you say?" McDonald asked.

"It's _nightclubs_ in _Ibiza_. Some amount of criminality is to be expected," Cecil replied primly, "But these didn't strike me as the usual sort of drug dealers and whoremongers. Very poorly dressed."

Sherlock, who has remained a huge clothes snob, considered this to be a very cogent observation.

"And you two met again when he married?"

"About a month before. He invited me, that's why I came back to England, to be his best man."

"So let's talk about his marriage," Inspector MacDonald inquired, "Did you know Mrs. Chandra before they became acquainted?"

"No, I met her in the run-up to the wedding."

"But you've been... close to her since then."

Barker looked down his aristocratic nose at the policeman, and replied levelly, "I don't care for what you're implying, sir."

"Oh, no offense intended. But a lovely woman like that, an older husband… things have been known to happen," the policeman said with that fun fake understanding tone they like to do when they think you're guilty.

Barker turned red, and spat, "There has never been _anything_ wrong between Nora and myself. You will never find a more loyal wife, or a more loyal… friend. To Sachi. Than I was."

"Speaking of marriage," Sherlock said, "I couldn't help but notice that the late Mr. Chandrasekar had some minor postmortem injuries to the left ring finger. Abrasions, swelling. As if someone had tried to remove his wedding band, and couldn't. Thoughts?"

Barker got flustered.

"I… perhaps the robber had tried to remove it in order to salvage something, once they knew the house was alerted?" he stammered.

Sherlock grinned. Sharkily. I assume.

* * *

"Sketchy," John commented.

"Yes," Sherlock agreed, "Clearly there was something he was hiding. And there was something else I didn't like about the housekeeper's story. A shotgun blast is loud, yes. But that house is literally a fortress, stone walls throughout. The room in which the shooting took place was heavily insulated, almost soundproofed, and frankly when you fire point-blank into a human skull the brain and bone act as a fairly effective silencer. How did-"

His mobile pinged again. Sherlock frowned at the screen, paged through something, and then exclaimed, "John, change of plans. Let's head into Tunbridge Wells."

"What's in Tunbridge Wells?" John asked.

"The nearest morgue. Mr. Chandrasekar's autopsy has just been completed. I want to have someone outside the family try to identify the body and fortunately I have the perfect someone available."

John glanced over to me, and asked quietly, "Is that okay?"

I nodded.

It was very much not okay.

"The real features of interest, then, are the ring. And the _echoing_ gunshot."

* * *

"I want you to do everything you can," said Nora Chandrasekar, upon being interviewed, "Have you found anything out yet?"

If she seemed fearful rather than hopeful, Sherlock miraculously refrained from commenting.

"I'm told," Inspector MacDonald queried, "That you did not enter the room when the tragedy occured?"

"No, Cecil warned me away. I didn't… I imagine it was quite horrible. And imagination is enough."

"How long did it take for you to descend the stairs?"

"Not long. I hadn't been asleep yet, but I was drowsing, so… a minute, or two?"

"Now," Sherlock inquired, "You only knew your husband in England, I believe?"

"Yes. We met six years ago, and married shortly after that," Nora said, faintly smiling.

"Did you ever believe that he, or you, by your association with him, were in any danger?"

"I knew we were," Nora said calmly, "And I didn't care."

Sherlock and Inspector MacDonald gave one of those masculine disdainful looks at one another, most likely. Nora continued on, "It was obvious. I could see how he was suspicious of strangers, how he kept his history to himself, the precautions he took to keep our home safe. And I didn't care. His past was his business. His future was mine."

"A lovely sentiment," Sherlock said, slowly, "It looks as though someone tried to remove his wedding band, but failed. Do you have any idea why the murderer might have done that?"

Nora gave that faint smile again.

"Mr. Holmes, I haven't the foggiest idea."


	12. First meetings (Rosie)

The Hoopers, apart from Mrs. Hooper, seemed a little scary to me. They weren't regular English people like Dad, they were _fancy_ English people, like on TV. Plus they looked like you'd taken photos of the same girl at three separate ages and then brought all of them to life at once.

We ate a "Toad in the Hole" which revealed to me that apart from not actually _liking_ to eat meat, at least not to the extent I'd implied to my mother… I _really_ wasn't impressed with English food, apart from the fish and chips. There was way too much gravy and nobody seemed to have heard of the concept of spices. Then Mrs. Hooper went into the kitchen to get the dessert out of the oven and all three of the kids fixed their pale blue eyes on me.

"So Uncle John… is your _daddy?_" asked Maggie, the littlest one.

"Um, yeah, he is," I replied.

"But we don't know you," Joanie, the middle one, said, "We know Uncle John."

"He has a room in our house," Maggie agreed, "So why don't we know _you_?"

"I… I've always lived with my Mum. In Uruguay," I stammered.

"Uruguay is a country in the southeastern region of South America. It borders Argentina to its west and Brazil to its north and east, with the Río de la Plata (meaning _the River of Silver_) to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast," Izzy, the eldest, explained to her sisters.

"Did he donate his sperm to your mum? Is that why you don't live with him?" asked Joanie.

"Oh my God," exclaimed Izzy, "Do shut up."

"No, she's right," said Maggie, "You must have both sperm and ovum or you cannot make a baby."

"We have to tell people our dad was an a-non-ny-mous sperm donor, if they ask. He's a _secret_," Joanie explained.

I sort of wanted to die, but as an alternative I explained, "No. They were married and everything."

Joanie set down her fork, reached over, and patted my hand.

"Sometimes when a married couple can't get along any more then they have to have a divorce," she said soothingly.

"Or a murder!" chirped Maggie.

"Or a murder," Joanie agreed, "But they had a divorce instead?"

"Oh, for..." Mrs. Hooper said, carrying in a hot dish full of what I would shortly find was toffee pudding (ugh), "You know, given the DNA in this room I'm probably wasting my breath but it _is _actually possible, my angels, to mind your own business. Eat your pudding and stop bothering Rosie."

We ate the pudding, and then the two younger ones took off to the library to do their music practice. As the soft strains of paired violins began to sound through the house, I picked my plate and Joanie's off the table and carried them in to the kitchen. Izzy (who was apparently tone deaf and therefore didn't play an instrument) followed along after me, and watched as I scraped both of them into the trash can and took them to the sink to rinse them off.

"Sometimes…" she began, "My sisters can be awkward. And _nosy_."

"No, it's okay," I replied, "I… even _I _just don't know the whole story, I guess. I don't know why my mum and dad split up, or why he didn't ever take care of me, or…"

Or anything.

"That must be very painful," Izzy said, with an odd stiff sort of kindness. Then her eyes sharpened and she asked her mum, "You must know, surely, Mother?"

Mrs. Hooper sighed.

"I know some of it. But apparently there are big gaps in my knowledge and what I do know really isn't my story to tell."

She plucked the plate out of my hand and picked up a sponge.

"But you _do_ deserve to know it, Rosie. So when your parents get back, ask them. You're entitled to know your history."

With a gentle smile, she angled her head towards the door.

"You don't need to help with the washing-up, you're our guest. Izzy, go entertain her."

The two of us headed out to the back garden where she'd shown me the knife throwing earlier. Bees buzzed, sipping nectar from the overgrown roses and lilacs. I took a breath.

Izzy Hooper finished up at just over six feet, but even back then, aged 13, she was taller than me. She has and continues to have enormous mad hair, sharp cut-glass cheekbones, and was approached by a modeling agency for the first time later that same year, which bewildered and annoyed her. She's brilliant, and mad, and curious about _everything,_ so she asked me, "Did you really run away from home and fly out here to find your father?"

"Yeah," I shrugged.

"Was it difficult to forge the unaccompanied minor paperwork?"

"It wouldn't have been, but I ended up picking an airline that counts people over fourteen as adults. So I didn't have to."

Izzy folded her arms, looked up at the sky, and mused, "_Fourteen_, eh?"

I'm not entirely incurious myself, so I asked, "Did you really get accepted into Cambridge already?"

She snorted, "Like it's difficult. I didn't really want to go, though, I just wanted to prove that I could. Imperial College is far better for what I'm interested in, and honestly I'm not entirely certain I want to go to university at all. I mean, _yes_, one needs the degree in order to enter the professional ranks but constraining the mind into the lockstep of academia seems to _me_ to be rather a stifling than an enriching experience. Father may have a point about the merits of working for oneself but then of course he's chosen a profession where that's much more _attainable _than it is in aerospace."

"Right," I said, because you end up saying that a lot when you're with Izzy, "I think I probably still will go to university, though."

She shrugged.

"For literature or history?"

"Uh, neither. Medicine."

"Oh, God, no, you'd hate that," Izzy chuckled.

"What? No, I wouldn't. Anyway how would you know what I'd like?" I argued.

Izzy looked me up and down, and then… she deduced me. It was the first time for us.

"The same way I know that you play football, you're a mediocre chemistry student but a keen cook, you're sentimental, and you've kissed a boy but you haven't had sex yet."

I blinked. Kind of a lot, and then asked, "How the _hell_ did you know that?"

She smiled. Her whole family loves this bit.

"When Maggie ducked in front of you, you executed a perfect juke to avoid crashing into her, clearly something you've practiced a lot. Two healed and one fresh minor knife injuries to your non dominant hand and one healing burn on the back of the dominant wrist… yes, admittedly there's other ways you could have done that but given your age and the therefore limited odds that you are getting them via your employment balance of probably points to "cooks." Your shirt has white bleached-out lines at countertop level. You leaned against the bench as you worked, your shirt came into contact with some dessicated corrosive substance, and then laundering caused the bleaching effect… studying chemistry. Mediocre because you clearly didn't clean your workspace, and a clean workspace indicates precision and care which _matter _in that field. And you're sentimental, because you've kept the shirt, even though it's trashed and not particularly expensive. Clearly some sort of emotional attachment to it."

She grinned at me triumphantly. I opened and closed my mouth like a fish. Finally I asked, "And the… the kissing bit?"

"On that one I was guessing. I was right, though, wasn't I?"

Around this point is the moment when I decided to shrug my shoulders and just go along with things.

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you have sex with the boy you kissed?" she asked curiously.

"'Cause I didn't think much of the kissing. It was kind of… damp. And empanada flavored," I told her.

"Interesting."

I sighed, and picked up a discarded tennis ball that was lying in the grass. I tossed it up in the air, caught it again.

"Do you ever feel like your parents just… sort of suck and don't really know what they're doing?" I asked.

"Most times, yes," Izzy agreed, "But yours honestly seem to be much worse."

She considered, briefly, then said, "I enjoy building model rockets, out in the potting shed."

"Right," I replied.

"I'm really not satisfied with the commercially available motors. Once you get above a size E you have to switch away from black powder to an ammonium perchlorate and aluminum powder blend and I'm not a fan. So as an alternative I've been experimenting with hypergolic propellants instead."

"I don't know what those are, but okay."

"A hypergolic propellant consists of a fuel and an oxidizer that self-ignite when bought into contact with one another. Highly dangerous, very flammable, really not the sort of thing children should be working with _at all._"

"Right."

"Would you like to help out?" she asked.

With a sense of utter relief I replied, "Oh, God, yes."

Notes: Nothing hypergolic should be handled at home even by grown-ass adults. Do not try it. Possibly Izzy may have stolen her speech about Uruguay from the first lines of the wikipedia article on that country. Blame Uncle Mycroft.


	13. All the little angels (Mary)

The morgue in question was in the basement of a large, blocky, modern hospital building, and in the years since I'd originally known him, apparently Sherlock had gone from "minor notable" to "celebrity."

"Oh, my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my _gosh_ Mr. Holmes," the duty pathologist, a gingery whipper-snapper in his early thirties exclaimed, "When they said _you'd_ be coming here I couldn't believe it! I _love_ your blog and your books!"

"Thank you," smiled Sherlock, "I'm so pleased you enjoy them."

(Meanwhile John rubbed his nose and rolled his eyes.)

"May I present my associate, Doctor John Watson, who you've probably heard of. And this is _Inspectora _Canción del Rio, who is assisting me on this case," Sherlock continued, looking at me.

"_Hola,_" I said, throwing on the Uruguayan accent, "Pleased to meet you."

Sherlock lowered his voice to a confidential thrum, "She's with Interpol. This affair has _international _connotations."

"_Gosh,_" the whipper-snapper breathed. He then asked Sherlock for his autograph, received said autograph, and took us off to a small viewing room without any further ado such as asking for our ID or for any proof that we had the right to be there.

A still form lay on a steel table, covered in a clean baby-blue sheet.

"Inspector _River Song_?" I asked Sherlock weakly, trying to postpone the inevitable.

"Surely you have to have noticed the resemblance," he replied, stepping over to the corpse. He glanced up at me and asked, "Are you ready?"

With my confirming nod, he lowered the sheet, exposing the head and chest. The face was a horror. I don't want to discuss it. But everything else… the wide shoulders, the broad hands, the smooth olive skin and heavy, black hair… _that _was a tragedy.

"It looks like his hair was just starting to go grey," I mused, tears catching in my throat. Ajay had gotten out. He'd been happy. He'd aged. And then it had all caught up to him again, and it was so bloody _unfair._

"There were four of you in AGRA, Mary," Sherlock said softly, "You, Ajay, Alex, and Gabriel. Could this have been either of the other two men?"

I shook my head and drew a shuddery breath, "Um, no. Alex's tattoo was on his bicep. Gabe's was on his thigh. And they both were, well, white. Both of them died years ago, too. I'm the last one, I guess."

"Where's _your_ tattoo?" Sherlock asked curiously.

"Sherlock..." John warned, setting a warm, comforting hand on my shoulder.

"I'm sorry about your friends," he murmured kindly. I squeezed his hand with my own.

"Well…" Sherlock said, "John, would you possibly care to step out into the hallway for this bit?"

"Why?" John frowned. Sherlock sighed, and then tugged the sheet down the rest of the way, past the y-incision and its big black stitches, to reveal…

Oh.

"Oh," I said, now no longer particularly _sad_, so much as _confused_.

John looked from me, to Sherlock, to… well to the dead naked stranger in front of us and then took his hand off my shoulder and said, "Seriously? '_Not his face?_'"

Sherlock grinned widely, as I said, "Ajay wasn't, um…" I made a snipping motion with my fingers, "Though… I mean, I suppose he could have had that done later? It's been years since I've seen him."

"Speaking for the middle-aged men," John spat, "We're not normally queuing up to have bits of our dicks lopped off."

"And that's obviously a scar from an _infant_ circumcision," Sherlock said gleefully.

"Oh, yes, obviously," I agreed.

"Circumcision without a medical indication is quite rare among Hindus, even nonpracticing ones like the so-called late Mr. Laghari-slash-Chandrasekar. When I saw the photographs in the autopsy I started to suspect! We have _the wrong man!_"

"But… it's _so_ like him, Sherlock," I exclaimed, "The height, the build, the hair. And the tattoo! That can't be a coincidence."

"Any other distinguishing marks you care to mention, Mary?" John asked in a cloyingly sweet tone.

I frowned at him.

"They're not actually all that distinctive or unique, _John_. I couldn't necessarily pick _yours_ out of an identity parade either. No. I can't recall any of the moles or scars or whatever, either. It's been practically ten years."

He tutted, and briefly said, "Fine. So… what do you think is going on here, Sherlock? He just faked his death and substituted in a copycat corpse?"

I snorted, "That's total amateur hour bullshit, Ajay would know better. A substitute corpse means forensic evidence which means a _much_ bigger possibility of getting caught. I mean… look what's happened right now! Just _leaving_ is cleaner."

Sherlock and John stared at me, Sherlock with an absolutely brutally offended expression, and John… looking _hurt_.

"If you can get a good enough corpse then it's a very effective means of suppressing people's interest in pursuing you," Sherlock huffed, finally.

"And it's _really_ not any cleaner for the people you leave behind you," John said quietly.

Oh.

There was an awkward silence. Sherlock tugged the sheet back over the corpse and cleared his throat.

"As planned disappearances go, this one _would_ seem to be quite clumsy, that's correct. Certainly not done with the skill I'd expect of an intelligence agent. I think it's time we went back to the house. We've a mystery to solve."


	14. Climax and anticlimax (Sherlock)

We climbed back into the Land Rover and John and Mary_ immediately_ embarked on their first domestic in sixteen years.

Well, probably.

Admittedly she'd been back in the country for several days and I'd only been around them for less than twelve hours so I have no proof of my hypothesis.

"So," John said.

"Yes?" Mary purred.

"Ajay Lakhari. Spy, assassin, your group's technical boy."

"You…" Mary hesitated, "You _did_ read that drive, didn't you?"

"Uncircumcised."

"Yeah," Mary snipped.

"So that's what you did after me."

"I mean," Mary said, "Technically Ajay _bracketed_ you, but yes."

"An international man of mystery totally seems like the best potential stepdad material I can think of," John snapped.

Mary arched her spine and puffed out her fur to make herself look more intimidating and said, "Do you want to think about that sentence for thirty seconds and see if it sounds any cleverer than it was? If you have a problem with Ajay then you have a problem with me and he would never, ever harm a child."

"I mean the interesting thing is really that he's probably not actually dead," I said mildly from my seat in the back, "Not so much that he used to shag Mary."

John glared at me in the rearview mirror. Mary turned around and glared at me directly.

"Fine," they snapped in unison, and faced front again.

"Item: a shooting of a corpse intended to duplicate one of the residents of the house. The housekeeper probably wasn't in on it, the friend and the wife almost certainly _are_. Item: a possible love affair between the putated Mrs. Corpse and his handsome best friend. Item…"

I hesitated.

"An intercepted internal correspondence of a consulting criminal society directing me to the crime. Because there's half a dozen motivations for it otherwise: commonplace insurance fraud, a trick to invoke probate on an absent but not dead rich man… but that message is the worrying bit."

"So what are we going to do?" asked John

"So I'm going to go and be a total bastard to one of our suspects until it all falls into place."

"That's still your main method?" Mary asked.

"It's a classic," John sighed.

About a quarter mile from the house, I said to John, "Let's just park here and walk up." So he did, pulling the Land Rover off at a flat place in the road.

"Mary," I said, "They haven't seen you before. So I'd like you to wait five minutes and then follow along after us. Keep an eye out."

"What for?" Mary asked curiously.

I smiled.

"Oh, you know. Anything of interest."

John and I then headed up the curving path to the Chandrasekar house, only to find Nora Chandra and Cecil Barker sitting in the garden, next to one another on a bench tucked next to the yew hedge, heads close together… probably too close for mere friendship, hand in hand. Their expressions were serious, intense, and they practically leapt apart when they saw us approaching. John scowled. I, meanwhile, said into my mobile, "Yes, Macdonald, I do think we'll want your lot to come out here and drag the moat. There may well be a piece of vital evidence concealed within."

Then I rang off from my completely fictitious phone call and made a selection of victim at random.

"Mrs. Chandrasekar," I said, with a sympathetic smile, "May I introduce my associate, Doctor John Watson. I'd like it if we could just have another brief word with you? In private?"

Nora Chandra glanced nervily at Cecil Barker, and then said, "Of course, Mr. Holmes, Doctor Watson. Won't you come in?"

She dithered. Insisted on making us tea, etcetera. Totally, gratifyingly suspicious behavior.

Tea and biscuits in hand, we sat down in the house's elegant main sitting room. Mrs. Chandra toyed with the rings on her right hand, but maintained a calm demeanor overall.

"You probably don't… I hope that what you saw out in the garden doesn't make you think that I'm somehow…" she hesitated.

"Oh, it's been made quite clear to me that we're not to have opinions about women and what they do," John replied, taking a sip of his tea.

"I _always_ have opinions," I rejoined, "But in this case I'm somewhat mystified. The case, as presented by you and Mr. Barker, is as follows. Your husband was alone when he was surprised by an intruder carrying a sawn-off shotgun. After a brief struggle he was shot, killing him instantly. The murderer then escaped across your moat. This is a lie. The police realize that just as much as I do."

Nora had gone white, and she set down her cup with a shaking hand.

"The crime which the police believe you and your lover to have committed is almost as simple. Either he or you shot your husband, and attempted to stage it as a home invasion gone wrong. Poorly, I might add, that single footmark on the windowsill was very clumsy. Your footmark, I believe, Mr. Barker has much larger feet, althouth I doubt I'd be able to prove it in court assuming you had the minimal amount of sense needed to wash your feet from then 'till now. This crime would carry a murder charge for at least one but probably both of you, possibly with an additional count of conspiracy depending upon whether there's any evidence of premeditation. Murder carries a mandatory life sentence, of which you can expect to serve approximately sixteen years, most likely at Wormwood Scrubs. You're pretty, though. That does influence sentencing in your favor."

"Mr. Holmes, _please_-" Nora began pleading.

"And _that_ story's just as much a lie as the first one, which is why it's unfortunate that you're preparing to be imprisoned over it," I interrupted her, "This is what _I_ think happened."

I rose to my feet and started to pace out my thoughts. At this point I do need to confess it might have been better to have John compose this segment for me, as when _he_ does it you can envision the deductions swirling around my head in a sort of data cloud.

This is not in any way an _accurate_ description of how I think, incidentally, but it's quite a striking visual, and I have no idea how to get it onto the page.

"Your husband killed a man who had broken into your house. A man who had a striking resemblance to him in ways that couldn't be coincidental and which enabled him to be a reasonable approximation of Mr. Chandrasekar's corpse. His history had prepared him for something of the sort, but he had not prepared either you or Mr. Barker. Fortunately, you had some time… your deaf housekeeper hadn't heard the first shotgun blast. He fled the scene with your knowledge and connivance. You and Mr. Barker dressed the corpse in Sachi's clothes, attempted to stage the scene accordingly, and fired another shot… this one out the window, where it echoed against the downs and woke your housekeeper."

I whirled upon her, and said, "So I must now ask, Eleanora, where is-"

Just then, completely stomping on my denouement, Cecil Barker came in, hands in the air, a sopping wet parcel in one of them. Mary walked directly behind him, one hand on his broad shoulder.

"Nora, look out, she's got a gun!" he exclaimed.

"Indeed I do," Mary cooed, pressing something into the small of his back, "Now toss that over to Mr. Holmes, please."

Barker did, tossing what turned out to be a light cashmere sweater wrapped around a small, silenced revolver, and a wickedly sharp hunting knife.

"That's a good boy," Mary said, "You can lower your hands now, dear. It's not a gun, it's a lipstick."

Barker whirled around, to see Mary tucking a small gold tube back into her pocket.

"A _lipstick_?" he spat, high color on his cheeks.

"Not a psychic one, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve. Inspector River Song, at your service. Sherlock, I saw this one hooking that out of the moat with a fishnet. Thought that might count as "anything of interest.""

"Indeed it is," I said, putting on gloves to pick up the small but deadly assassin's gun. The magazine was full. It hadn't been fired. But the knife had one severe chip on the cutting edge. You see that sometimes, when it catches on bone.

I rose to my feet, balancing the knife in my right hand.

"Where is Mr. Chandrasekar, you two? The real one."

At this moment a panel in the wall opened and a haggard man, pallid under his olive skin tone, staggered out. He carried a gun in his right hand, and his left was clamped over a dark red stain that had spread over his ribs.

"Rose?" Ajay asked shakily, "Is that you?"

* * *

Author's note: Sorry that took so long, everybody. There were life and holidays and then I was inspired to write Sherlolly porn and then required to write Sherlolly AU fluff and it just took me away for way too long.


	15. Interlude: Icemen (Ajay)

_Spring 2018_

There was another woman staring down the barrel of my gun. Until a few years ago, I could have said I'd never killed a woman.

I'd had standards, once.

Unlike Rose, unlike that poor Margaret Thatcher fan who came home early on the only day where it mattered, this one didn't look horrified, so much as _offended_.

"How dare you, sir!" Lady Smallwood snapped, "What is the meaning of this?"

"Not ammo," I said quietly. There wasn't as much satisfaction at the moment as I had been hoping, "The English woman, called _Amo._ Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. You learned that, in your bloody first-class degree in _literae humaniores_ at Oxford, didn't you… Love?"

"Mr. Agarwal," Lady Smallwood seethed, "I don't know what you think-"

"Why did you do it?" I interrupted, "AGRA took your money and did what you asked and as best I can tell never did a _damn_ thing to you or to MI6 that deserved your burning us. So _why?_"

There was a small click behind me. A round being chambered.

"The answer, of course," drawled Mycroft Holmes, "Is that she didn't. Please drop your gun, Ajay, or I will feel obliged to shoot you."

He edged around into my line of sight, leveling a small pistol at my head. I obviously didn't drop the gun. I hadn't come into HQ planning to shoot a peeress with any expectation of leaving alive.

"I'd _wondered _why the great Mycroft Holmes hadn't made me," I laughed, "Six months fetching your tea and reading your paperwork and I really did think I'd got away with it."

He shrugged.

"I believed you had come for _me._ Did you kill the real Vihaan Agarwal?"

"Oh, _really, _Mycroft," Lady Smallwood said, rolling her eyes.

"I was never an assassin, Holmes," I spat, never taking my gaze off her, "And I wish people would stop accusing me of being one. Vihaan Agarwal went native, married a nice Sikh girl in Himachal Pradesh. I paid him fair and square for his identity. Lucky all us wogs look alike."

This wasn't _entirely _fair, Agarwal and I had at least a passing resemblance. But it had been _far_ too easy for me to replace him, and I thought they ought to know that before it was over.

"Lady Smallwood is innocent in this matter," Holmes declared, "Love _is_ her code name, yes. But that name is known among a small circle of people, including her former secretary, Vivian Norbury, who used it to impersonate her. _She_ was the English woman."

My eyes slid over to him, at that.

"When the story of Mary Watson's past history came to light, we reopened the AGRA case file. We'd discontinued all work with independent consultants like yourself after Tblisi, but the fact that at least one of you had survived suggested we may have missed something."

He shrugged one elegantly-waistcoated shoulder.

"It wasn't actually that difficult to find. She wasn't an intelligence agent herself, after all. She'd been selling secrets for years… not particularly effectually, as far as we can determine, she didn't make nearly as much money as she ought. The Georgian ambassador had discovered this, and was threatening to reveal it, and so she had to go. AGRA was merely… collateral damage."

"So where is she?" I said, resuming my steel-eyed gaze down the barrel of my gun.

"That would be a question beyond my purview," Holmes said, "She was tried, in secret of course, convicted, and sentenced to imprisonment. Where she died, almost a year ago now. Pancreatic cancer."

I laughed aloud.

"Well isn't that fucking convenient?"

"It isn't particularly convenient at the moment!" he snapped, "If you shoot her, Ajay, you'll be murdering a woman who has never harmed you. Look, I…"

He stammered a bit.

"I can prove it, given twenty minutes and access to the higher level archives, which I have and you _know_ that I have."

Slowly, Mycroft lowered his gun to the floor, raised his hands in supplication.

"Justice is not available to you, and that goes on my lengthy list of personal regrets. But you can have freedom, and peace. And you can give my regards to Mary Watson."


	16. The AGRA treasure (Sherlock)

The "doctor" portion of John's personality (as opposed to the obnoxious and possessive ex portion) happily kicked in after a moment, and he dispatched Mary (as the most locally unrecognizable of us) to the village chemist's with an illegible-to-me prescription for flucloxacillin. By the time she returned, he had cleaned and stitched Lakhari up, drawn a line around the infected area with sharpie and said, "Red beyond this line means you need to get to hospital for IV meds, I don't care if you're a superagent," and the man was sitting on his own sofa drinking a nutritional smoothie made by his anxious wife.

Mary came back with the tablets in a small paper bag, and Ajay took his first dosage of antibiotics, wincing slightly at the bitterness.

"I can't believe it's you, Rose," he smiled, a surprisingly sweet expression on such a dangerous man, "What are you doing here?"

Mary shrugged, and said, angling her head towards me, "Bit of a small world. One of those coincidences that this one claims don't exist."

"I stopped claiming that years ago," I mused, "Though in this case…"

John and Mary eyeballed me, and then returned their attention to Ajay.

"Can we now hear the actual narrative, Mr. Lakhari?" I asked the man.

Ajay looked at Nora and Cecil edgily, but answered levelly enough.

"Most of what they said was true. I was doing my workout before bed, the others had already gone up. He came at me with a knife just when I was finishing the bench press. We saw later that he'd bought a gun, but he must have wanted to keep the noise down."

Lifting a hand to his bandaged ribs, he winced and said, "He got me almost right away. I've been out of the game too long, it's too easy for people to beat my arse anymore, eh, Rose?"

Mary smiled.

"But I was already moving so it wasn't deadly, and I was able to fight him off. We struggled for a few minutes and then I was able to get to the gun and take him out."

"That was your gun?" John asked.

"The shotgun? Yes. Totally legal, too."

"Not sawn-off it's not," I disagreed, "But it'd be a minor penalty and defense of yourself from a deadly attack is a perfectly good protection from prosecution."

"That's what we were going to do at first, Mr. Holmes! Just call the police and have done!" Nora exclaimed, "But then when Cecil and I heard the shot and came down, we saw the tattoo he had, and Sachi… or that is to say, Ajay…"

He interrupted her.

"Nora and Cecil never had any real idea of my past."

"Though we both rather suspected something," Cecil interjected wryly.

"It was the greatest mistake of my life not to tell them," Ajay said quietly. Nora reached out and intertwined her fingers in his.

"We know now," she murmured.

Ajay cleared his throat.

"Anyway. We saw the tattoo, and I knew that this wasn't just purely a random attack. It was someone who was trying to look like me. And I knew what that meant."

"Yeah," Mary agreed.

"What?" asked John.

Ajay and Mary shared a knowing look, and finally she shrugged.

"It's easier for you to get yours out. Go on and show Mr. Holmes, Ajay. We can trust him."

Ajay rolled up the sleeve of his olive-green shirt to reveal the same tattoo that we'd seen on the body… simple, stylized, four circles close-packed into an equilateral triangle. I leaned in for a closer look.

"You can't really see it, you have to go by touch," Mary said, but I, in fact could see it… a small raised scar, and when I ran my fingertips over it I could feel a bump beneath the skin, small and narrow, no longer than a grain of wild rice.

"An RFID chip?" I asked.

"Mmm," Mary replied, "The AGRA treasure."

We all looked at her. Mary sighed, and began, "You already know about the portable drives. That's where the team kept all our information. But we kept all our money in a bank in Grand Cayman. Completely anonymous, completely untraceable. The only way any of us could access any of it was by having a quorum… at least three out of the four RFID chips physically present in one place at one time."

"You lot really didn't leave much down to trust, did you?" John asked.

"We didn't need to, that was the whole point," Ajay replied sarcastically, "It's easy to trust people when you've made it almost impossible for them to betray you. It's much harder when you have to give them the opportunity."

"The thing is, though," said Mary, "Whoever did this obviously didn't know the entire story. The whole point of an anonymous bank account is that it's anonymous. It's not like we had to rock up there with the RFID chips plus two forms of ID apiece. That… the dead man, he just needed three chips. And it didn't have to be implanted. Alex's wasn't, the idea gave him the screaming willies, so he wore his in a gold capsule around his neck."

"He gave it to me before he died," Ajay sighed.

"How much money is it?" I inquired.

"Well, that's the thing… nothing. Rose and I closed it out about ten years ago, divvied it between us when we split up. There wasn't any point in keeping it in that format any longer, it was really inflexible."

"All right, then, how much money was it?"

Mary looked up at the ceiling, calculating.

"With the currency exchange back then, I'd say… about twenty million pounds? Give or take."

"Sounds about right," Ajay agreed.

John choked on his own saliva.

"You have ten million pounds?" he asked Mary disbelievingly.

"I have about three million pounds."

John stared at her, until Mary rolled her eyes and said, "Look, he spent six years being violently tortured during which I basically moved to England got a job and married you. I figured he'd earned the lion's share."

"Twenty million is a very fair motivation for murder. But why the wedding ring? You're still wearing yours, Ajay. So why did you try to pry it off of the dead man?"

"Wedding ring?" asked Ajay.

"Ah… that would be. Well that would be my wedding ring," Cecil Barker stammered, "You'd gone into the panic room and the police were on their way when we realized he didn't have one. I didn't pry it off, I pried it on. He had broader fingers than I do."

From his position behind Ajay, he put a hand on the other man's shoulder. With the hand Nora wasn't holding, Ajay reached up to clasp it.

"The law would allow me to marry either of them, Mr. Holmes. But not both. And so… while it's informal, it's true."

Mary raised her eyebrows, looked at the trio, and grinned.

"A happy ending!" she exclaimed.

"I don't suppose there's any possibility of my getting it back? Sentimental value, and all?" Barker inquired.


	17. Midnight (John)

We arrived back at Sherlock's very late. The rain and cold had come in with the dark, and the light from their living room shone out into the storm like a beacon.

Sherlock let us in and I let the warmth of the fire sunk back into me. Molly, an empty wine glass at her elbow, looked up from her book as we came in.

"I told you not to wait up," Sherlock said, flinging himself onto the sofa next to her.

"I don't wait up for Sherlock Holmes," Molly replied, a small smile creeping about her lips even as she shivered at the touch of his wet coat. Sherlock sighed theatrically, slung an arm around her shoulders and tugged her to him so he could kiss the top of her head. Like every time he does that sort of thing, it gave me a bit of a twinge.

Sherlock Holmes, of all people, managed to work love out, and I failed. Over and over again.

Molly asked, "Did you solve the case?"

Sherlock eyed Mary leerily, and slowly replied, "Sort of, though there's a bit more yet to discuss. But for tonight it's over."

"Good end to the day, then," Molly said, rising to her feet and stretching, "We've actually got a full house tonight, even putting Rosie in with Izzy."

"Isabelle. Did they get along then?" Sherlock asked, "I'd rather hoped that they might."

"Oh yes," Molly said dryly, "Like a house on fire. Or rather, like a potting shed. Which they lit on fire."

Mary blanched, and stammered, "Oh, God, Molly, I'm so sorry. Rosie's… she's been acting out a bit lately, but she's really a good girl, and I'll certainly pay for any damages."

Molly and Sherlock exchanged a very-married _look_, and then Molly said, "This is... not exactly an unprecedented experience for young Miss Jack Parsons upstairs. I'm 100% sure it was Izzy's fault. And really it was a very small fire, the girls put it out themselves, I didn't even make the fire service roll trucks."

"Ah," Mary said.

"I'll take the extinguishers into town and get them recharged tomorrow," Sherlock volunteered.

"_I'll _do that," Molly rejoined, "_You_, o Great Detective, can figure out exactly how she keeps getting hold of the bloody hydrazine. Anyway, Izzy and Rosie are in together-"

"Isabelle," Sherlock interrupted sternly.

"And Mary, I've put your things in the guest room, second on the right at the top of the stairs."

Mary hesitated, looking at the carpet, and then asked, "Would you mind… would you mind if I went up to check on her, before I go to bed? Rosie's… it's the first time she's spent more than a night apart from me."

Molly shrugged, and we crept up the narrow staircase and popped our heads 'round the door of Izzy's surprisingly pink-and-princessy bedroom. The girls were sprawled out all over the canopied bed, in that innocent relaxed slumph of childhood, only slightly scorched, snoring quiet little matched snores.

We closed the door.

Molly cleared her throat.

"Rosie's… obviously a very intelligent and self-sufficient young woman, with excellent manners. It's been quite nice, I think, for Izzy to have a Watson of her own-"

"It's _Isabelle _and _Rosa del-_ oh, for God's sake, never mind," Sherlock interrupted.

"And it would be nice if that could keep on," Molly concluded, looking straight at Mary's face.

There was one of those women emotional things happening, I could tell.

"Yeah," Mary agreed.

Sherlock put his hand in Molly's, and then said, "And so to bed. Good night, adult Watsons."

"Night," I agreed. They went off, and Mary was making to do the same when I asked suddenly, "I might have a nightcap before I turn in, you want one?"

She shrugged, and we headed back down the stairs, where Mary curled up on the sofa while I let myself into Sherlock's massive liquor cabinet. This was, as of late, quite a process… Izzy was getting to the age where kids do tend to start experimenting, and Sherlock was paranoid that she might have inherited the "substance abuser" gene from him.

So as I stared into the retinal scanner, I used the excuse of no eye contact to say, "I was being kind of a cock today, about you and Ajay."

"You were a bit, yeah," Mary agreed, "But I get it. It's been a bit much, and it is… weird. Interacting with your exes after a long time."

The first lock clicked open, and I started in on the passcode.

"_You_ weren't like that with _him_."

"Yeah, but Ajay and I split up with respect, affection, and a mutual understanding that we weren't right for one another."

I opened up the cabinet and pulled out the Talisker for myself and a bourbon for Mary.

"Sounds fake, but okay," I said, pouring out two generous belts.

Mary snorted, and said, "Yeah, I didn't think it was possible either but apparently it is. Basically…"

She tugged out the elastic holding her long dark hair back, and extended a hand to accept the drink I'd poured her.

"Ajay… would never harm a child. That's entirely true. But that doesn't exactly correlate to being good with children or interested in them… you'll notice he's never made any of his own even after marrying a supermodel twenty years younger than he is. And I was very much in mum mode back then. I sort of went into a maternal coma when Rosie was born and didn't really come out of it until she was ten."

She took a healthy sip of her drink, winced faintly, and kept on.

"He wanted to do… well, I guess what he apparently actually did, go and be a rich party person. And I wanted to own a yoga studio and a beach house in a lovely city in a nice peaceful country and _not be hassled_. And the whole poly thing actually_is _something that matters to him and it really never held any appeal for me, although seeing the sort of people he's able to pull-"

"Fwaaaa," I agreed.

"I possibly should reevaluate that," she chuckled, "We'd had a past together. Didn't mean we had a future."

Mary shrugged.

"I'm glad it all worked out for him. Chin chin."

We clinked glasses and I took a sip of my own. Mary stared into the dying fire. We sat quietly in the dark.

"Rosie said you have tons of boyfriends, anyway," I broke the silence with, "All kinds of guys after you all the time."

Mary frowned, and looked at me.

"Oh dear."

"Yeah."

"We should probably have a bit of a chat with her tomorrow morning if she's trying to matchmake. This isn't "The Parent Trap.""

"I know."

Mary ran a hand through her hair, tousling it, then looked down her nose at me.

"If you must know, I _do_ date. Here and there. When it seems appropriate. I haven't met anyone worth bringing home to Rosie since Ajay, but I do. But "tons of guys after me all the time" is a _bit_ of an exaggeration of the rampant sex appeal of the fiftysomething single mum."

I mulled that one over, sipping my scotch.

Then I thought, _"__Oh, what the hell, why not?"_

"It may not be _true_," I said, dropping my voice a bit, "But it's not an _exaggeration_. Not at all."

Mary nearly choked on her drink, and then she _stared_ at me, eyes dark in the flickering firelight.

Finally, _blessedly_, she took one last deep swallow.

"Oh, what the hell," she murmured, "Why not?"


	18. L'Esprit d'Escalier (Mary)

The French, for whatever reason, have a lot of good phrases for this sort of moment.

_Post-coital tristesse._

_Nostalgie de la boue._

All sorts of lovely phrases that don't _quite_ express the desired sentiment, which is that it's an absolute bloody shame for a couple to be so masterful at that one aspect of love and so completely _pants _at literally everything else about it that matters.

After a quiet but extended and athletic shag, which was brilliant, as it _always_ is with John, I'd nodded off. In his bedroom, in Sherlock Holmes's palatial house, I slept like a baby, and didn't wake until sunlight crossed over my face.

John was staring at the ceiling. He'd put on a t-shirt and shorts… I remembered that, all of a sudden. He never liked to sleep naked. It made him uncomfortable.

I personally didn't mind it, but I figured it was probably time for me to get back to my own room before the rest of the house woke up. So I sat up on my elbows and started looking for my underwear.

"Do you still hate me?" he asked quietly, looking at the cracked plaster above him, "For… everything. How we ended up."

I raised my eyebrows and thought about it as I pulled my knickers back on.

"No. I mean, if you'd asked me about it sixteen years ago when I was broke and lonely and pregnant and scared…" I bit down on my lip and smiled in lieu of crying, "But you and I are from a _very _long time ago. No, I don't hate you. Do you hate me?"

"I don't think I ever did. I was just… _so_ pissed off at you. For _such _a long time."

My bra had landed on the lamp at the far corner, so I put it on and picked up my camisole.

"So," said I, with a false cheeriness, "Elephant in the room, huh?"

I waggled my own bare left hand at him, and said, "You're _married_."

John sat up, blushed, and said, "Um. Yeah. Yeah I am. Though obviously things aren't going so well for us just at the moment."

Shirted, I sat next to him, and said, as the person who he had _just _slept with, "Kinda got that, yeah. There wasn't much of a feminine touch at the house. What's she like?"

"Brilliant. Beautiful. Mad," John chuckled ruefully, "Probably the great love of my life, and I've fucked it up."

"What's her name?" I asked.

John scrubbed his hands over his face, and said, "Look, I _know_ it's actually Rosamund and you haven't used it in years. But in my head, it's always going to be Mary-"

I sprung back to my feet, and said, "Wait, what? Back the fuck up. You were talking about _me?_"

John frowned, and pointed at the ring on his hand.

"That's not _our_ wedding band!"

"Um… yeah, it is."

"Look at the inscription, John."

John worked the ring off his finger and peered at the inside and said, "Oh, shit."

"Yeah."

"Okay, I think I know what happened here. Sherlock and I had infiltrated an illegal gambling ring involved in human trafficking and it was the final hand and I was tapped out and needed to go all in and there must have been another married man at the table and we had to leave in kind of a hurry-"

"John-"

"Look, Mary, Sherlock was going to _die _and-"

"I do not care that you lost a two hundred quid wedding ring, I care that in _your_ mind apparently you and I have been in a monogamous relationship for the last _sixteen years_!" Then I lowered the volume of my voice, because I was getting rather shrill.

John, unbelievably, looked guilty at this.

"I wouldn't say… _monogamous, _exactly."

"You amaze me."

"I dated Sherlock's sister for six months, for example," he volunteered.

I frowned.

"He has a sister?"

"Oh, that's right, you missed all of that. That was-" he scratched his head, "That was batshit, if you want to know the truth."

"John, I sent you a _lawyer_," I said desperately.

He scowled, and said, "I'd actually forgot about that. _That_ was a real cute stunt. What the hell possessed you?"

"I was _trying _to be _nice,_" I hissed.

I hadn't missed these sorts of rows.

John drew a breath, and smiled a bit tentatively at me.

"So… all that stuff. Just now. You thought… you thought that was you and me…. having an affair."

I folded my arms, taken even more off kilter.

"I mean…"

"You homewrecking slag," he commented mildly.

"Oh fuck off, I wasn't homewrecking. It was a _lovely_ and _sentimental_ send-off to a part of our lives that was deep and meaningful, and it provided closure and completion."

John blinked like a cat, and finally said, "Okay, men and women look at the same situations _very_ differently."

We sat in stillness, until he said, "You remember _exactly_ what our entirely commonplace wedding rings looked like."

"And I could probably pick your penis out of an identity parade too. It's how my brain works. Shut up."

"I have always believed," John said carefully, "That I was _entitled_ to get a divorce or an annulment. It was well within my rights. But then I never met any other women who I thought could lace your shoes up, and so I never bothered. It's just paperwork."

He laughed, unexpectedly.

"The closest competition you ever had was Eurus Holmes, if you can believe it. And then she turned out to be a serial killer who tried to drown me, so…"

There was… I was really curious about that whole story, all of a sudden.

But instead I laughed semi-hysterically and said, "Oh, God, John… what the hell are we going to do?"

The answer to this question came in the form of a quiet tap at the bedroom door. Rosie popped her head around, and said, "Hi, Dad. Sir. I'm kind of hungr-"

She stopped dead when she saw me.

And the _deshabille _we were in.

Her perfect little face crumpled almost instantly, and she hiccuped, "You wanted _her_, you didn't want _me_. That's what happened, isn't it?"


	19. The short sad story of John and Mary

"God, Rosie," my Dad choked, "No. I wanted you. I wanted you before you _existed_. Your mum and I both did… we were trying to get pregnant even before we were married."

Mum shot an irritated glance at him and came over and took me by the hand.

"Which is something _you _really should never do. But yes. I was already older, and we didn't know how much time we would have before it would be impossible. We _always_ wanted you."

"Of course then she got pregnant the first try out the gate."

"About which your smugness _remains _misplaced, John," Mum said, drawing me over to sit between them on their bed.

"No, Rosie. What happened was-"

She exchanged a glance with my father, and sighed.

"You know, already, that there are secrets in my past. You don't know what they are. And at the time your father and I got married he didn't even know that much."

"Then a very bad man found out the truth about me. He was threatening to expose me-"

Dad frowned, and interrupted. "A couple years after you left, Charles Magnussen-" and here he made a rather unpleasant noise at the back of his throat, "Was that you?"

"No, that was Ajay. Giving me a thoughtful and unique gift."

"Ah."

I had clearly missed a bit there. I looked between them, the tears standing in my eyes.

"I didn't want your father to find out about me, so I was trying to stop him, and in the course of that… I shot Mr. Holmes, to keep my secrets safe."

I was horrified, and recoiled from her, and she flinched.

"But he's so nice!"

"He was less nice back then," Dad said mildly.

"_John-_" Mom stated, "It was wrong. I didn't intend to kill him, just... take him out of the game for a moment. I did it as carefully as I could, and he seems to have recovered well. But it was the worst thing I've ever done, and your father found the truth out about me anyway, so it was pointless. Then..."

* * *

_Summer 2014, London, Baker Street_

_There'd always been softness in his eyes when he looked at her. It was gone. He couldn't manage it._

_Mary had gone blank. Had the gentleness, the sweetness, that was always in her expression, just been another lie?_

_The door to the street level slams shut. A moment later the siren switches on, and the ambulance pulled out. The blocked late-night traffic on Baker Street begins to move again._

"_You could have killed him. You still might," John drops into the silence, "What the fuck kind of monster are you?"_

_Blank, blank, blank face, and all of a sudden John feels like he could __hit_ _her, so he walks away and doesn't look at her any longer._

"_I'm… I'm not a monster," Mary stammers, "I just-"_

"_Just what?"_

* * *

"You were cornered, when you did it, and you made what you thought was the best decision available," Dad said with a sad smile, "It was wrong, but in the circumstances you didn't have many better ones. I could have figured that out, if I hadn't been-"

* * *

_Fucking __**infuriated**__._

_He __**could**_ _hit her._

_Oh, and that's your Dad, popping back up to say "Hello" in your brain like he does in these circumstances, isn't it, John? _

_John, by sheer force of will, unfists his hands, spinning around to confront her again._

"_Was any of it true?"_

_He speaks into the quiet of the flat._

"_Did you love me? Did you want to live with me? Did you like Sherlock or was it all just… a lie?"_

_Blank. Now with added crocodile tears, oh that's great._

"_I lied. Because I wanted you to love me. It was stupid to let myself…"_

_Mary takes a deep, shuddering breath._

"_I love you. I loved you always. That's_ _**why**_ _I lied, I couldn't bear for you not to love me back."_

"_Do NOT," he barks, "Put that on me. This is NOT anything to do with me."_

_John pulls a hand through his hair, tugging hard enough to hurt._

"_Jesus Christ, Mary. I wish to God I'd never met you. You're the worst thing that's ever happened to me."_

_Blank. Stillness._

"_And… and the baby?" Mary asks. Quite calmly._

"_Is it even mine?"_

* * *

"I didn't actually think you weren't mine," Dad said, smiling ashamedly at me. "I wanted to hurt your mum's feelings."

"You did. You really did."

* * *

"_Of-" Mary stammers, "Of course it's yours, John."_

"_Ah, so attempted murder, lying about your entire life, stealing a dead child's identity, those are all completely fine but fucking somebody else when you're married is just a bridge too bleeding far." _

"_I didn't attempt-"_

_She shuts her mouth on whatever she was going to say next, closes her eyes briefly._

"_Okay," quietly, "Okay. If you're sure. I'll go."_

_And she goes._

* * *

"So she went," Dad said, "I thought just… home. Away from me. To let me clear my head a bit. But then a few days later this old fellow in a really expensive suit turned up at Baker Street, which is where I was staying at the time."

* * *

_The solicitor presents a rectangle of heavy cardstock embossed in deep black ink with the name of a very important law firm in which he's a name partner, introduces himself._

"_Two days ago, a young woman came to my offices and solicited our assistance in drafting a rather extraordinary document. It was unusual enough that I thought I might deliver it myself."_

_John receives a thin folder, and opens it to read a lot of legal boilerplate containing phrases such as, "The woman using the aliases Mary Elizabeth Morstan and Mary Elizabeth Watson," and "Having entered into matrimony by means of fraud" and "Does not intend to resume conjugal relations with recipient."_

_John blinks, and asks, "What's all this for?"_

"_Her stated intention was to facilitate the process of a divorce without her response, although given the extremely short duration of the relationship we advised her that decree of nullity would probably be more practicable."_

_The old man looks curiously at John, and says, "There's clearly an interesting story here," with the clear implication that he would like to hear it, but John is already out the door._

_The house in Maida Vale is empty and clean. Mary's identification, her passport, checkbook and their two joint-account credit cards sit on the bedside table, along with two rings in a red velvet box. There are two suitcases missing, along with some (but by no means most) of her clothes. He will find, later, that she gave the cat to her friend Cath._

_And that's the end. The story is over._

* * *

Dad rubbed his hands over his face.

"And at first I thought… good riddance."

He didn't make eye contact with me, as he continued on.

"I didn't… I didn't know you then, Rosie. I guess I still don't. You weren't a person in my mind yet, and so I was just able to... let you go. And I was so angry with your mother. For _months_."

He glanced over to Mum.

"A bunch of… _really _difficult stuff happened after that, and I did eventually get over it. But by that point you'd both already been gone for a long time, and, well- I was ashamed. I'd let a pregnant woman _in danger of her life_ go haring off into the unknown with nobody to help her. I wouldn't have thought I'd do that to a stranger, let alone you. But I did."

"I'm unusually well equipped to look after myself, John," my mother quipped dryly, "But I… I could have put some nonzero amount of effort into staying. I could have tried. Given you a chance. But it was always easy for me to run away."

She stroked my hand, "Until you, my darling."

"There were so many times, over the years, I _almost_ went to Sherlock and said, "Find them. Just so I can see them again," Dad said, "But I was ashamed, and I was a bit scared. As to what you might have done in a tight spot, Mary."

Mum arched a brow, and he muttered, "You're pro-choice and everything."

"Doesn't mean I go about aborting wanted pregnancies left-right-willy-nilly. That was never even a consideration, darling. I wanted you too. You're the best thing that could have ever happened to me."

She sighed.

"You and I are going to have to learn how to live with one another as… as adults. You're not there _yet_," she warned, "So maybe less with the fleeing the country bit. But it's happening sooner rather than later and adjusting to that is on me, Rosie. I just have to get the hell on with it."

Dad reached out and put his hand over where mum's and mine were clasped.

"Maybe we all can get the hell on with it. It's time we figure out how this family works," he said softly.

Notes: Sorry for the delay in posting this chapter. I have no valid excuses. Only one more to go!


End file.
